I have the following method to save an Object to a file:
// Save an object out to the disk
public static void SerializeObject<T>(this T toSerialize, String filename)
{
XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(toSerialize.GetType());
TextWriter textWriter = new StreamWriter(filename);
xmlSerializer.Serialize(textWriter, toSerialize);
textWriter.Close();
}
I confess I did not write it (I only converted it to a extension method that took a type parameter).
Now I need it to give the xml back to me as a string (rather than save it to a file). I am looking into it, but I have not figured it out yet.
I thought this might be really easy for someone familiar with these objects. If not I will figure it out eventually.
Use a StringWriter
instead of a StreamWriter
:
public static string SerializeObject<T>(this T toSerialize)
{
XmlSerializer xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(toSerialize.GetType());
using(StringWriter textWriter = new StringWriter())
{
xmlSerializer.Serialize(textWriter, toSerialize);
return textWriter.ToString();
}
}
Note, it is important to use toSerialize.GetType()
instead of typeof(T)
in XmlSerializer constructor: if you use the first one the code covers all possible subclasses of T
(which are valid for the method), while using the latter one will fail when passing a type derived from T
.
Here is a link with some example code that motivate this statement, with XmlSerializer
throwing an Exception
when typeof(T)
is used, because you pass an instance of a derived type to a method that calls SerializeObject that is defined in the derived type's base class: http://ideone.com/1Z5J1.
Also, Ideone uses Mono to execute code; the actual Exception
you would get using the Microsoft .NET runtime has a different Message
than the one shown on Ideone, but it fails just the same.