How To Deserialize Missing Boolean Field to TRUE

Question

I'm deserializing a custom object from a file to an object in my app using the XmlSerializer. My issue is that I want a field in the object to default to "True" rather than "False" for a new property that doesn't exist in the file that I am deserializing from.

By default, .Net is assigning this value to be false because it doesn't exist in the file and I want it to default to True if it doesn't exist. I used the System.ComponentModel.DefaultValue(True) attribute on the field in the definition of the object, but that didn't work. Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

You can set the value of the boolean in the empty constructor of your object directly. This way the deserializer will create the deserialized object with true in the boolean.