Question

In C# 4.0, I have a standard object, called “Customer” It has properties and a public empty constructor.

I need to serialize a generic List<Customer> to XML so I can save it, then load it up and deserialize it back.

Is there now framework support for this that is simpler than it was in .NET 2.0 ?

Answer 1

Here’s what I use in my library of goodies:

public static string SerializeAsXml<TSource>(object element) where TSource : new()
{
    return SerializeAsXml<TSource>(element, new Type[] {});
}

public static string SerializeAsXml<TSource>(object element, Type[] extraTypes) where TSource : new()
{
    var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TSource), extraTypes);
    var output = new StringBuilder();
    using (StringWriter writer = new XmlStringWriter(output))
    {
        serializer.Serialize(writer, element);
    }
    return output.ToString();
}

public static TDestination Deserialize<TDestination>(string xmlPath) where TDestination : new()
{
    return Deserialize<TDestination>(xmlPath, new Type[] { });
}

public static TDestination Deserialize<TDestination>(string xmlPath, Type[] extraTypes) where TDestination : new()
{
    using (var fs = new FileStream(xmlPath, FileMode.Open))
    {
        var reader = XmlReader.Create(fs);
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(TDestination), extraTypes);
        if (serializer.CanDeserialize(reader))
        {
            return (TDestination)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
        }
    }
    return default(TDestination);
}

Not super simple, but it works. Note this deserializes from a path only, but you could easily change it to deserialize from a string, just strip out the FileStream.

The XmlStringWriter looks like:

public class XmlStringWriter : StringWriter
{

    public XmlStringWriter(StringBuilder builder)
        : base(builder)
    {

    }

    public override Encoding Encoding
    {
        get { return Encoding.UTF8; }
    }

}

I’m simply forcing UTF8 encoding on the XML output.