Question

The intial problem was that when I called a webservice ( asmx) methos with a type the type was always going through as null . Inspecting the Soap confirmed that the type was going as an empty element. So I tried a simple test.
Here is my type which of course has been generated from WSDL

[System.CodeDom.Compiler.GeneratedCodeAttribute("System.Xml", "4.0.30319.233")]
[System.SerializableAttribute()]
[System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute()]
[System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute("code")]
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlTypeAttribute(Namespace="http://dto12.api.echosign")]
public partial class SendDocumentInteractiveOptions {

    private bool authoringRequestedField;

    private bool authoringRequestedFieldSpecified;

    private bool autoLoginUserField;

    private bool autoLoginUserFieldSpecified;

    private bool noChromeField;

    private bool noChromeFieldSpecified;

    /// <remarks/>
    public bool authoringRequested {
        get {
            return this.authoringRequestedField;
        }
        set {
            this.authoringRequestedField = value;
        }
    }

    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnoreAttribute()]
    public bool authoringRequestedSpecified {
        get {
            return this.authoringRequestedFieldSpecified;
        }
        set {
            this.authoringRequestedFieldSpecified = value;
        }
    }

    /// <remarks/>
    public bool autoLoginUser {
        get {
            return this.autoLoginUserField;
        }
        set {
            this.autoLoginUserField = value;
        }
    }

    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnoreAttribute()]
    public bool autoLoginUserSpecified {
        get {
            return this.autoLoginUserFieldSpecified;
        }
        set {
            this.autoLoginUserFieldSpecified = value;
        }
    }

    /// <remarks/>
    public bool noChrome {
        get {
            return this.noChromeField;
        }
        set {
            this.noChromeField = value;
        }
    }

    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnoreAttribute()]
    public bool noChromeSpecified {
        get {
            return this.noChromeFieldSpecified;
        }
        set {
            this.noChromeFieldSpecified = value;
        }
    }
}

Now here is some simple code to serialize it.

SendDocumentInteractiveOptions sdio = new SendDocumentInteractiveOptions();
sdio.authoringRequested = true;
sdio.autoLoginUser = true;
sdio.noChrome = true;
XmlSerializer xmlSer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(SendDocumentInteractiveOptions));
XmlWriter xw = new XmlTextWriter(@"g:\test.xml", null);
xmlSer.Serialize(xw, sdio);
xw.Close();  

And here is the resulting XML

<?xml version="1.0"?&gt
&ltSendDocumentInteractiveOptions xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"/>

So what am I missing here. Why are my public properties not getting serialized?

Answer 1

This is kind of an old question, but oh well. I think the solution might be in another question “Why isn’t my public property serialized by the XmlSerializer?”. Part of the answer lists reasons why an attribute would not be serialized and in that list is

• it has a public bool FooSpecified {get;set;} property that returned false

In your code, you set the various Boolean values but set the related specified values. I was facing a similar issue and setting the specified value fixed it for me.