in one project, I use datamember to serialize a class to an xml file, like,
[DataMember]
public string Member1;
later I query the xml to get one value out, like:
XmlNode1.SelectSingleNode("Member1");
Is it possible that make the Member1 above to a variable so when I change the DataMember name to be Member2 the Member1 in the query can be changed to Member2 automatically ,rather than I manually change it?
I am not exactly sure I understand what you hope to achieve, but I am thinking if you want to be able to centrally control the output from the serialization, you could define the tag in say a public static class.
static class SerializationConstants
{
public static string MemberTag = "Member1"; //or "Member2"
}
Then in your datamember you can use the property with the Name attribute.
[DataMember(Name=SerializationConstants.MemberTag)
public string Member1;
That would control serialization such that in your code for querying the xml, you can do something like:
XmlNode1.SelectSingleNode(SerializationConstants.MemberTag)
It would be a hack but I guess it should do if I understood your question correctly.
You should deserialize the XML file when working with it, then you can use field names to access properties and they would change if you would do refactoring.
This doesn't sound like a great idea.
If you are concerned about property names changing in your class with the DataMember attribute, you are probably going to want a layer of abstraction in the form of a DTO between that class and your XML querying. That way your XML querying class doesn't care if that member name changes or not because your DTO will never change. Just the mapping from the DTO to the volitle class.
Related
My boss have a strange request, he wants me to add a new function to serialize and deserialize all our products classes and add in the XML file all their property's types automatically.
I can't modify the classes to add new "types properties" before every "real property".
Is there a way to do this with [XmlAttributes] or something else ?
Thank you.
Maybe this is what you are looking for https://learn.microsoft.com/dotnet/api/system.xml.serialization.xmltypeattribute?view=netcore-3.1
this article describes the XmlTypeAttribute, which you can use to add a type attribute (in xml) on your properties tag.
[XmlType("aType")]
public string MyProperty {get;set;}
I have a situation where I need to deserialise XML to a model, and then map that model using automapper to another model.
The issue is that the XML is structured in such a way that the element names match the properties in the model that I'm initially trying to map to...but for the most part the actual data is in an attribute called 'Val' in the element e.g.:
<Vehicle>
<RegNo Val="ABC123A"/>
</Vehicle>
Now the normal way to do such a mapping, I think, would be (I've not bothered with a root element!):
[XmlElement("Vehicle")]
public class Vehicle {
[XmlElement("Regno")]
public Regno Regno { get; set; }
}
public class Regno {
[XmlAttribute]
public string Val {get;set;}
}
That would allow the XML to map to the 'holding' object, but it does mean that rather than referencing a string called Regno, making the mapping to the second model fairly simple, I would have to reference Regno.Val. This doesn't sound a lot, but there's a lot of elements in the XML, and some of them use differently named attributes and the like. What I'd really like to do is define all the heavy lifting in the holding model defintion, using XMLAttributes etc. along the lines of:
[XmlElement("Vehicle")]
public class Vehicle {
[XmlElement("Regno.Val")]
public string Regno { get; set; }
}
So almost like being able to supply a path, or qualified value name. Effectively, moving the data one place up the hierarchy if that makes sense!
Is it possible to do this? I mean I could set up bespoke mappings in the automapper for moving from the holding model to the main model, but it would simpler if I could just go through the properties in the assemblies for each model and map from one to the other. Also given that not all the attributes are called 'Val', it could make things a bit messy, and it would be better if I could deal with it at the outset at the time the data is deserialised.
Edit: Should have added that I've tried the 'path' approach and couldn't get it to work, so I should have asked 'Am I doing it wrong?'
I have a simple set of 20+ classes. They are all serializable to allow use of these objects within a web service. (DataContract/DataMember) Each of them has an ID and a variable number of other properties, depending on the class.
And I have a database which will store just an ID, a Name that identifies the class and an XML string. And this XML is also the same data in serialized form, but without one property: the ID field should not be stored, since it's redundant.
But the ID must still be sent to the client of the web service, making things a bit complex. And although I could just create a copy of each class, where one has the ID as DataMember and the other doesn't, I'm just looking for a much cleaner solution to solve this. One where I would not need to store the ID field as part of the XML within the database.
So, question: what is the simplest solution to make sure the ID becomes part of the data that's sent to the client, but skipped when storing it as XML? (Without the need of hacking in the XML to remove it.)
And although I could just create a copy of each class, where one has
the ID as DataMember and the other doesn't
What about inheritance?
public class MyEntity
{
// some props
}
public class MyEntityWithId : MyEntity
{
public int Id { get; set; }
// some props
}
Hello I am working on an project in which I should serialize and deserialize my objects to Xml and back to objects. I use the XmlSerializer class in order to achieve this. So my problem is that I can't figure out how to prevent the serialization if the attribute value of an element is invalid. For example I have an element with name person which contain 1 attribute (name)
I would like to prevent the user to put other names than (Alex, Nick,..) in this attribute I need something like xsd restriction (pattern) in this case but for my model. How can I solve this problem?
If you just want conditional serialisation, you can do this with the ShouldSerialize* pattern. So if you have a property Name (for example), you can add:
public bool ShouldSerializeName() {
/* validate; return true to serialize, false to skip */
}
The method needs to be public for XmlSerializer, although the same pattern works in other places (System.ComponentModel, for example) even if no-public.
I'm not sure weather it is a good idea to ignore some data in certain circumstances, but if you really wanna do this, take a look at the IXmlSerializable Interface. I think implementing this interface manually will be the only way to fulfill your requirements.
I have some types I want to serialize as xml, but these types have read-only properties like:
public List<Effect> Effects {get; private set;}
but the xml serializer requires these properties to be writable.
Isn't xml serializer using reflection, so in effect can easily set these properties via reflection even though they are read-only?
Is there a way around this because I don't want these types to be editable by people, so the properties must be read-only, but I also want them to be xml serializeable.
Its not possible because As mentioned in MSDN
XML serialization is the process of converting an object's public properties and fields to a serial format (in this case, XML) for storage or transport.
But you can use DataContractSerializer. Here is a link to Marc's Answer on SO
Serializing private member data
Update
You can get over that behavior by leaving Auto Implemented properties and have somthing like this:
private List<Effect> _Effects;
public Effect()
{
_Effects= new List<Effects>();
}
public List<Effect> Effect
{
get
{
return _Effects;
}
}