I love serialization -- right up to the point where it breaks. I have always found that it's difficult to get right if the out of the box stuff breaks. However, I may have changed my mind. I had to do some of my own serialization because some of the properties that I was working with in my class didn't serialize well. After a long and drawn out look at the problem here's my input:
- Implement the IXmlSerializable interface. It contains three methods
- GetSchema() has been obsoleted. Just return null. There's a suggestion that you should use an [XmlSchemaProvider] attribute on your class to communicate the method to be used to return the schema for your Xml serialization. My recommendation is to skip it -- if you don't have to validate your Xml (and I don't know why you would) you don't have to have this.
- WriteXml() writes the data to an XmlWriter. Use WriteAttributeString(string, string) to write out the attributes you need. You can also write out sub-elements but using attributes is easy enough for non-complex types.
- If you need to write out a blob of data in middle of your tag you can use WriteCData() to write the contents of a string to the center of your element tag.
- ReadXml() reads the serialized data from an XmlReader. Getting your content out is as simple as doing .MoveToContent() and a set of indexer deferences for attributes (i.e. reader["myAttributeName"]). Finally if you want to read the inner contents you put into a CData section you can do .ReadString().
That's all there is to writing your custom Xml Serialization interface. This way you don't have to worry about the dynamic assemblies.
[http://thorprojects.com/blog/archive/2009/07/16/ custom-xml-serialization-of-a-net-class.aspx]