ISerialization Constructor not getting called

Question

EDIT: The solution to my problem is to implement IXMLSerializer. Thanks everyone for the quick responses.

Hi everyone, I'm having this issue and I do not seem to a find a proper solution to it.

I have the following class

public class Child
     {
      private int _id;

      public int Id
      {
       get { return _id; }
       set { _id = value; }
      }

     }
     [Serializable]
     public class Test: ISerializable
     {
      private int _id;

      public int Id
      {
       get { return _id; }
       set { _id = value; }
      }

      private Child _child = new Child();

      public Child Child
      {
       get { return _child; }
       set { _child = value; }
      }

      public Test()
      {
      }
      protected Test(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
      {
       if (info.MemberCount > 1)
        Child.Id = info.GetInt32("ChildId");
      }


      #region ISerializable Members

      public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
      {
       info.AddValue("ChildId", Child.Id);
      }

      #endregion
     }

If I send the following XML to be deserialzed

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><Test><Id>0</Id><ChildId>10</ChildId></Test>

using the following code to deserialize

serializer.Deserialize(new StringReader("<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><Test><Id>0</Id><ChildId>10</ChildId></Test>");

I supposed that would call my Serialization constructor, but the thing is that is never getting called.

I am using the above posted XML instead of this one

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><Test><Id>0</Id><Child><Id>10</Id></Child></Test>

Because I'm getting the xml posted from another application, so I need to manually created child objects and assigned its value manually from within the constructor.

I'll really appreciate all the help and guidance you can provide me.

Answer 1

To customise XML serialization I believe you need to use IXmlSerializable rather than ISerializable.

I think that requires a parameterless constructor, and you then need to implement ReadXml and WriteXml. In other words, it doesn't use the same constructor as binary serialization.

Answer 2

What is the serializer variable you use? If it's an XmlSerializer, your serialization hooks won't be called because the XmlSerializer doesn't support them (see IXmlSerializable).

HTH, Kent

Answer 3

XmlSerializer does not use SerializableAttribute, ISerializable nor the constructor taking the SerializationInfo info and StreamingContext parameters. Those constructs are used when using SoapFormatter (obsolete) and BinaryFormatter for serializing.

        BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
        using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            Class1 c1 = new Class1();
            bf.Serialize(ms, c1);

            ms.Position = 0;
            Class1 c2 = bf.Deserialize(ms) as Class1;
        }