Reinject dependencies of a freshly deserialized object

Question

If a program has literally just deserialized an object (doesn't really matter how, but just say BinaryFormatter was used).

What is a good design to use for re-injecting the dependencies of this object?

Is there a common pattern for this?

I suppose I would need to wrap the Deserialize() method up to act as a factory inside the container.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I would use the OnDeserialized attribute to point at a method that would do the re-injection.

Answer 2

Since the dependencies were not serialized themselves, I assume their state is independent of the state of the deserialized object. You might therefore simply re-inject the dependencies by providing properties for them which would be called immediately after the call to "Deserialize".

Answer 3

Unity has a concept of "BuildUp" where you can ask it to fulfil the dependencies of an existing object. I don't know if autofac (which I presume you are using from the tags) has an equivalent.

Answer 4

You shouldn't serialize objects with dependencies that can't themselves be serialized.

Instead, split it into two classes: extract the serializable parts into a separate class.

After deserializing, you can associate the resulting object with an instance of the original class (the one with dependencies).