Pete's Place

« Updated PHP guide | Main | Updated PHP Install Guide »

April 30, 2007

Serializing a generic dictionary in .NET 2.0 using the BinaryFormatter

When using the BinaryFormatter to serialize a strongly-typed dictionary that extends System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary<>, I found out that one must add a constructor that accepts SerializationInfo and StreamingContext parameters, then just passes those on to the base class:

using System;

using System.Text;

using System.Collections;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Runtime.Serialization;


namespace MyNamespace.DataTypes {

  [Serializable]

  public class MyDictionary: Dictionary {

    public MyDictionary()

      : base() {

    }

    public MyDictionary(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context)

      : base(info, context) {

    }

  }

}

The error I was getting was, "System.Runtime.Serialization.SerializationException: The constructor to deserialize an object of type 'MyNamespace.DataTypes.MyDictionary' was not found."

I got the idea here: http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=314430, which has the code example in VB.NET.

To serialize Dictionary objects using an XML serializer, you have to implement a custom dictionary as described here: http://weblogs.asp.net/pwelter34/archive/2006/05/03/444961.aspx.

Posted by Peter at April 30, 2007 11:35 AM

Comments

Posted by: Nicolas Jolet at May 7, 2008 03:19 PM

Posted by: giano at May 8, 2008 03:42 AM

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:
Remember Me? YesNo

Comments: