Problems serializing class which inherits from a generic list

Dan Morphis — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:22:29 GMT

Usually I post solutions I've discovered or created to problems I've encountered. Now, I've run into a problem with the XmlSerializer and I need your help solving it. Scroll to the bottom for an update.

The Problem

I have a class called Foobar. Foobar inherits from List<string>, and contains one member Title. When I use the XmlSerializer to serialize and deserialize Foobar, all the items in the List are make it through safely, but the member Title does not.

The Code


using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.IO; using System.Xml.Serialization; internal class Program
{ private static void Main()
{ Foobar f = new Foobar();
f.Add("1");
f.Add("2");
f.Title = "Title";
MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Foobar));
xs.Serialize(mem, f); mem.Seek(0, 0);
mem.Seek(0, 0);
Foobar deser = (Foobar)xs.Deserialize(mem);
Console.WriteLine(deser); } } [Serializable] public class Foobar
: List<string> { public string Title;
}

The Solution

One way I came up with to solve this problem is make Foobar not inherit from List<string>, and make a member called Items that is a List<string>, but that's kind of hokey. I've searched Google and can't find a solution. So I'm appealing to my dear readers for a better solution.

Update

Looks like I was being way to specific in my Google search, searching on "XmlSerializer List" gives us this http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=566175&SiteID=1 as the first item. In the post,

Elena Kharitidi says "XmlSerializer does not serialize any members if a collection. Only collection items get serialized. This is by design, basically a decision was made to handle collections as arrays not as classes with multiple properties, so collections should look like arrays on the wire, therefore they do not have any members other then collection items, and can be “flattened” by adding the [XmlElement] to the member of the ICollection type."

Long and short, I need to use the hokey solution I came up with (or something like it), or write my own serializer.

IIrrelevant - XmlSerializer

Problems serializing class which inherits from a generic list

The Problem

The Code

The Solution

Update