Serialization

Question

I have written some code that iterates through all of the properties of a number of objects [Ok, they all happen to be derived from System.Web.UI.Control]. My goal is to be able to persist and restore these properties for special purposes. The problem I am running into is that many of the properties are of types that do not support serialization (e.g. Unit). I am looking for suggestions on the "best practices" for serializing this information. Obviously there IS a mechanism since these properties would normally be places into the aspx/ascx files if the conrols were being used in a "normal" fashion. Also I believe that these types can be remoted, and are therefore serializable in some fashion. While the current need is for Web.UI type items, I am looking for a solution that is fairly general purpose. Any and all comments [except for REALLY snide ones] appreciated.

davidh1 · Answer

You must implement ISerializable and add code to handle the serialization and deserialization. For example if you have a class like this: public class MyClass : ISerializable { int var1; short var2; Ob1 var3; ... } and Ob1 contains some non-serializable stuff do this: // First the serialization function is built to save every value needed // for reconstruction during de-serialization. Anything that does not need // to be saved for reconstruction can be ignored. //Serialization function. public void GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info StreamingContext context) { info.AddValue(var1 var1); info.AddValue(var2 var2); info.AddValue(name var3.name ); info.AddValue(rank var3.rank ); ...etc... } // second add a de-serialization constructor that does the reverse as follows: public MyClass(SerializationInfo info StreamingContext context) { var1 = (int)info.GetValue(var1 typeof(int)); var2 = (short)info.GetValue(var2 typeof(short)); string name = (string)info.GetValue(name typeof(string) ); double rank = (double)info.GetValue(ranktypeof(double) ); var3 = new Ob1(namerank); .. other stuff to initialize the object properly .. } Hope this helps. Dave