Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to serialize an IList<T>?

I wish to serialize an class (let’s call it S) that contains a property of the type IList<T> where T is another class which I have defined. I get an exception when I attempted to serialize an instance of class S to XML. This is understandable as the XmlSerializer doesn’t know which concrete class to use. Is there a way, hopefully using attributes, to specify which concrete class to instantiate when serializing/deserializing an instance. My implementation of class S creates a instance of the List<T> class. Here is some code to illustrate my example:

using System;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.IO;

[Serializable]
public class T { }

[Serializable]
public class S
{
    public IList<T> ListOfTs { get; set; }

    public S()
    {
        ListOfTs = new List<T>();
    }
}

public class Program
{
    public void Main()
    {
        S s = new S();
        s.ListOfTs.Add(new T());
        s.ListOfTs.Add(new T());
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(S));
        serializer.Serialize(new StringWriter(), s);
    }
}

I’m hoping there’s an attribute I can place above the ListOfTs definition that says to the serialize, “assume an instance of List<T> when serializing/deserializing”.

Answer 1

Change the

public IList<T> ListOfTs { get; set; }

to

public List<T> ListOfTs { get; set; }

Then it will work.