.NET Custom Xml Serialization

Question

I am working on some classes which I need to serialize/deserialize to xml, that can be used for configuration. Here is a sample of what I am trying to do

[Serializable]
public class MyConfig
{
    [XmlElement] 
    public string ConfigOption { get; set; }
    [XmlElement] 
    public Uri SomeUri { get; set; }
}

I want to override the way that the Uri property is being serialized. So when the serialize method is called, I want it to look like this

<MyConfig>
  <ConfigOption></ConfigOption>
  <SomeUri uri="" />
</MyConfig>

Is there a way to plug into .net serialization and override how all Uri objects are serialized and deserialized? Note that I dont want to create a class called MyUri and use that as the type of SomeUri, I just want to plug into the place where the serialized serializes types of Uri and override that behavior.

Answer 1

public class MyConfig
{
    [XmlElement] 
    public string ConfigOption { get; set; }
    [XmlElement] 
    public MyUri SomeUri { get; set; }
}

public class MyUri
{
    [XmlAttribute(Name="uri")]
    public Uri SomeUri { get; set; }
}

Answer 2

Since you don't want to create a new wrapper class for Uri, I think your only alternative is to MyConfig implement IXmlSerializable in order to have complete control over the XML serialization process.

However if you do this you'll have an all or nothing approach, since you will need to completely implement serialization and not only for the Uriproperty.