Question

Suppose I have the following class structure:

[XmlInclude(typeof(CustomNode))]
[XmlInclude(typeof(CustomNode2))]
[XmlRoot("node")]
class Node
{
    [XmlElement("node")]
    public Node[] Children { get; set; }
}
[XmlRoot("custom-node")]
class CustomNode : Node { }
[XmlRoot("custom-node-2")]
class CustomNode2 : Node { }

The I create the following structure:

var root = new Node { Children = new Node[2] };
root.Children[0] = new CustomNode();
root.Children[1] = new CustomNode2();

When I Xml serialize this structure, I get following output:

<node>
    <node xsi:Type="CustomNode"/>
    <node xsi:Type="CustomNode2"/>
</node>

But I would like to see (and be able to load properly) something like this:

<node>
    <custom-node/>
    <custom-node-2/>
</node>

Is it possible at all for XmlSerializer? The whole problem is because I intend to manually create source xml, and am trying to make it more humanreadble and friendly.

Answer 1

I found a solution for your problem which is nearly what you need:

  [XmlRoot(ElementName = "node")]
  public class Node
  {
    [XmlArrayItem(typeof(CustomNode), ElementName = "custom-node")]
    [XmlArrayItem(typeof(CustomNode2), ElementName = "custom-node-2")] 
    public List<Node> Children { get; set; }     
  }
  [XmlRoot(ElementName = "custom-node")]
  public class CustomNode : Node { }
  [XmlRoot(ElementName = "custom-node-2")]
  public class CustomNode2 : Node { }

results in:

<node xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Children>
    <custom-node />
    <custom-node-2 />
  </Children>
</node>

Hope that helps a bit.