How to avoid persistence logic in domain model?

Question

My domain model looks like this:

class Group
{
    private List<Person> persons;

    public void AddPerson(Person p) {
       persons.Add(p);
       DoSideEffect()
    }

    public List<Person> GetPersons() {...}
}

Now I need to persist it. By DDD I cannot add any persistence attributes to this class so xml serializers will not work. BinaryFormatter cannot be used since the format should be readable. I can manually call GetPersons() and persist them - but how am I going to load them back? If I call AddPerson() then there is a side effect. The side effect should only happen when a person is "really" added to the domain, not with persistrancy.

Answer 1

Lack of attributes isn't a show-stopper; XmlSerializer has a constructor to pass in this model at runtime ( but to be honest, most times the defaults are fine) - as so several other serializers. XML via XmlSerializer is obviously desirable if readability is a concern though. See XmlAttributeOverrides. I can also suggest some binary serializers that would work here.