Question

I’m trying to add XML serialization to a fairly trivial class structure in C#. Essentially, there’s a single instance of a root class (call it AClass), which holds a List of several instances of some other class (call it AnotherClass):

[XmlRoot("RootNode")]
public class AClass {
    [XmlElement("ListNode")]
    internal List otherObjects { get; set; }
}

public class AnotherClass {
    [XmlAttribute("Name")]
    internal string name { get; set; }
}

When serializing, I’d like for both these classes to be serialized together – that is, if I serialize AClass, its list of AnotherClass gets serialized as well (see this question).

I have this mostly working, but the problem is that during serialization, XmlSerializer only seems to want to deal with public properties of the class – it doesn’t serialize AnotherClass at all if the list is declared internal.

I tried making the assembly’s internals visible to the serializer:

[assembly: System.Runtime.CompilerServices.InternalsVisibleTo("System.Xml")]

That didn’t seem to do anything. Is there a way I can get XmlSerializer to recursively serialize lists of objects that are declared internal?

Answer 1

You’re on the right track… except that the actual serialization is not performed by System.Xml, but by a dynamically generated assembly. You can’t predict the name of that assembly (it’s randomly generated), so you can’t use it in the InternalsVisibleTo attribute.

The only solution is to pre-generate the XML serialization assembly. You can do that using the XML Serializer Generator Tool (Sgen.exe). The name of the generated assembly will be “YourAssembly.XmlSerializers” ; that’s the name you have to use in the InternalsVisibleTo attribute.