Is It possible to perform serialization with circular references?

c# serialization circular-reference
Arpit Khandelwal picture Arpit Khandelwal · Feb 15, 2011 · Viewed 8k times · Source

So, my entity class (written in C#) follows a parent child model where every child object must have a Parent property in which it keeps reference of its Parent.

This Parent property causes issues in serialization of the Object due to circular references.

I can't remove the reference to parent, neither I can mark it XmlIgnore (since I need to read it back when I deserialize the XML)

Any ideas on this?

Answer

Thomas Levesque picture Thomas Levesque · Feb 15, 2011

XML serialization doesn't support circular references, you need to exclude the parent property from the serialization using the XmlIgnore attribute. See this blog post for a way to maintain the relationship when you deserialize.

Alternatively, you could use DataContractSerializer instead of XmlSerializer. It supports circular references, but doesn't provide much control over the XML schema...

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