Save List with BinaryReader

larsp777

I have a class that has a list of objects. Since it doesn´t seem to work with xmlSerializer I´m trying to save to a binaryfile instead. When I use BinaryReader I read a string using ReadString but can I read a List or an object?

Wayne Gaylard

Fisrt off, you should easily be able to serialise a List with XMLSerializer, you just need to ensure that Your custom class is marked with the XmlRoot attribute, and you create a class that inherits from List that holds your collection, something like this

[XmlRoot("Persons")]
public class People : List<Person>
{

}

[XmlRoot("Person")]
public class Person
{
public Person()
{
}

public Person(string name)
{
    Name = name;
}

\[XmlElement("Name")\]
public string Name { get; set; }

}

then you can use this

using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter())
{
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Persons));
XmlSerializerNamespaces namespaces = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
namespaces.Add(string.Empty, string.Empty);
XmlWriter xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(writer, settings);
serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, personList, namespaces);
}

or something to that effect, and this should work to serialize to XML. If you still want to serialize to a binary file, you should use a BinaryFormatter like this

using (Stream stream = File.Open("people.bin", FileMode.Create))
{
BinaryFormatter bin = new BinaryFormatter();
bin.Serialize(stream, People);
}

and deserialise also using a BinaryFormatter

using (Stream stream = File.Open("people.bin", FileMode.Open))
{
BinaryFormatter bin = new BinaryFormatter();
var people = (List<Person>)bin.Deserialize(stream);
}

Hope this helps

When I was a coder, we worked on algorithms. Today, we memorize APIs for countless libraries — those libraries have the algorithms - Eric Allman