What's the best way to serialize a HashTable for SOAP/XML?

Question

What's the best way to serialize a HashTable (or a data best navigated through a string indexer) with SOAP/XML?

Let's say I have an Foo that has an property Bar[] Bars. A Bar object has a key and a value. By default, this serializes to the following XML:

<Foo>
<Bars>
<Bar key="key0" value="value0"/>
...
</Bars>
</Foo>

For JSON, this serializes to

{"Foo":["Bars":[{"Key":"key0","Value":"key1} ... ]}]}

What I'd really like to have is this serialize to better reflect the underlying relationship. E.g.,

<Foo>
<Bars>
<Key0 value="value0"/>
<Key1 value="value1"/>
...
</Bars>
</Foo>

I realize there are some challenges with serializing to SOAP in this way, but what's the best approach to providing a schema that better reflects this?

I've tried creating a BarsCollection object and defining custom serialization on that, but it doesn't seem to actually invoke the serialization on that object. E.g.,

void ISerializable.GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)
{
foreach (Bar bar in Bars)
info.AddValue(bar.Key. bar);
}


Any suggestions? What's the best practice here?

Answer 1

ISerializable isn't used for xml serialization; its used for binary serialization. You would be better implementing IXmlSerializable.

But I think that the KeyedCollection serializes more like you're thinking. Except you'll never get <key0 ... /> <key1 ... /> since the elements map to classes.

Answer 2

You could pass the hashtable in a SOAP Extension. That way, you can serialize it whichever way you would like. Although there is custom code for this that has to be on the client and server.

Answer 3

I really don't think that what you want reflects the structure better. To define a schema (think XSD) for this you would have to know all of the potential keys in advance since you indicate that you want each one to be a separate custom type. Conceptually Bars would be an array of objects holding objects of type Key0, Key1, with each of the KeyN class containing a value property. I believe that the first serialization actually is the best reflection of the underlying structure. The reason it "works" more like you want in JSON is that you lose the typing -- everything is just an object. If you don't care about the types why not just use JSON?

Answer 4

I think you're missing a fundamental key of the SOAP protocol.

One of the things I really like about the SOAP protocol is that you can define arbitrary objects (along with methods) in your WSDL file and pass these objects around from one end to the other using the SOAP protocol. You don't have to serialize the data on one end and then unserialize it on the other end.