C# – What’s the best way to serialize a HashTable for SOAP/XML

cnetserializationxml

What's the best way to serialize a HashTable (or a data best navigated through a string indexer) with SOAP/XML?

Let's say I have a Foo that has an property Bar[] Bars. A Bar object has a key and a value. By default, this serializes to the following XML:

<Foo>
  <Bars>
    <Bar key="key0" value="value0"/>
    ...
  </Bars>
</Foo>

For JSON, this serializes to:

{"Foo":["Bars":[{"Key":"key0","Value":"key1} ... ]}]}

What I'd really like to have is this serialize to better reflect the underlying relationship. E.g., 

<Foo>  
  <Bars>  
    <Key0 value="value0"/>
    <Key1 value="value1"/>
    ...
  </Bars>
</Foo>

I realize there are some challenges with serializing to SOAP in this way, but what's the best approach to providing a schema that better reflects this?

I've tried creating a BarsCollection object and defining custom serialization on that, but it doesn't seem to actually invoke the serialization on that object. E.g.

void ISerializable.GetObjectData(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) {  
  foreach (Bar bar in Bars){           
    info.AddValue(bar.Key. bar);
  }
}

Any suggestions? What's the best practice here?

Best Answer

I really don't think that what you want reflects the structure better. To define a schema (think XSD) for this you would have to know all of the potential keys in advance since you indicate that you want each one to be a separate custom type. Conceptually Bars would be an array of objects holding objects of type Key0, Key1, with each of the KeyN class containing a value property. I believe that the first serialization actually is the best reflection of the underlying structure. The reason it "works" more like you want in JSON is that you lose the typing -- everything is just an object. If you don't care about the types why not just use JSON?

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