Arbitrary Object Serialization/Deserialization

I frequently need to store and retrieve object state. I’ve found the .NET Framework’s XmlSerializer invaluable in this capacity. To make my life even easier, I’ve come up with a pair of functions that serialize and deserialize an arbitrary object to an XML file.

I’ve stripped out comments, exception handling, etc. for brevity’s sake.

public void Serialize(object obj, string path)

{

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());

XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(path, System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);

writer.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;

ser.Serialize(writer, obj);

writer.Close();

}

public object Deserialize(Type type, string path)

{

object obj = null;

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(type);

XmlTextReader reader = new XmlTextReader(path);

obj = ser.Deserialize(reader);

reader.Close();

return obj;

}

One noteworthy caveat to this technique is that XmlSerializer will only serialize public instance fields and public properties with both get and set defined.

Example C# usage:

public class Address
{
public string Name;
public string Line1;
public string City;
public string State;
public string Zip;
}

Address a = new Address();
a.Name = "John Doe";
a.Line1 = "123 Main St.";
a.City = "Anytown";
a.State = "NY";
a.Zip = "10900";

Serialize(a, @"c:\temp\address.xml");

Address a = Deserialize(typeof(Address), @"c:\temp\address.xml") as Address;

Notice I use the “as” keyword instead of casting. I prefer to use this form since it yields null on conversion failure instead of raising a NullReferenceException.

The resulting XML from the above example looks like:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>

<Address xmlns:xsd=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema” xmlns:xsi=”http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance”>

<Name>John Doe</Name>

<Line1>123 Main St.</Line1>

<City>Anytown</City>

<State>NY</State>

<Zip>10900</Zip>

</Address>

This stuff gets pretty interesting when dealing with complex object graphs.