Question

this dataserializer is great for performance. but I keep getting stuck on datacolumns that has datatype of System.Object causing the serializer to throw an exception:Cannot serialize data column of type ‘System.Object’.

is there any way around it?

Answer 1

The protobuf format is designed to suit scenarios where the data is predictable to the receiver, and does not suit “object” scenarios very well, however, depending on the data layout a few things are possible:

• if the “object” data is a nested message of some kind, then you can mark the member as “DynamicType=true” as part of the ProtoMemberAttribute decoration; this then includes some metadata, but as a protobuf-net specific extension. It will not be very portable between systems
• if the “object” data is really one of a handful of known types, typically things like int/DateTime/float etc then there are some ways of representing that with inheritance (non-generic base type, multiple specific T subtypes). Again, this will not be very portable between platforms

I can illustrate either if I understand the model more.