Most elegant way to serialize an object with byte[] members to an XDocument?

Question

I have a serialization utility that serializes an object to an XDocument. It works quite well :

public static class SerializationUtil
{
    public static T Deserialize<T>(XDocument doc)
    {
        XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));

        using (var reader = doc.Root.CreateReader())
        {
            return (T)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(reader);
        }
    }

    public static XDocument Serialize<T>(T value)
    {
        XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));

        XDocument doc = new XDocument(z);
        using (var writer = doc.CreateWriter())
        {
            xmlSerializer.Serialize(writer, value);
        }

        return doc;
    }

Been using it quite happily and suddenly I get :

There was an error generating the XML document.

The inner exception is :

This XmlWriter does not support base64 encoded data.

Turns out that the XDocument.CreateWriter() instance method gives you a writer of type System.Xml.XmlWellFormedWriter, and that that writer can't write base64 encoded data (my object contains a byte[]).

MSDN doesn't even seem to mention this class - but I can't seem to create any other type of writer from XDocument.

I could just serialize to a string, but i was trying to be clever and avoid using any hacks. Any way to serialize to XDocument when base64 is needed for certain fields.

Answer 1

According to the docs, there's no allowance for bytes. A surrogate base64 encoded string property is probably your best bet (is it a hack if its by design?).