Our system stores XML strings in a database. I’ve recently had to change the Properties on a Class, and now when an XML string gets deserialized it will throw an exception. What is the best way to handle this change? Look for the Node in the application code using XPATH or LINQ, or change the xml string in sql database (ie do a mass update)?.
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You might want to look at writing a custom XML deserializer (i.e. implementing IXmlSerializable, see here) to handle changes in your XML. If you’ve invested a lot of time into crafting your XML serialization attributes, you may want to look at another approach.
Consider batch-upgrading your XML, or deprecating (instead of removing) properties inside of your classes and mapping older behavior to newer behavior.
Longer term, you will want to come up with a strategy for dealing with this in the future, since you will most likely be continue to make changes to your schema/object definitions as you add/change the functionality of your system.