[Serializable]
In the preceding examples we assumed for simplicity’s sake that the object graph was serializable, and we focused on how serialization and deserialization occurred. Now let’s spend some time defining what it means for an object or object graph to be serializable, and how to mark your classes and structs as such.
Types that should support being serialized and deserialized by the runtime
must be marked with the [Serializable]
attribute, as follows:
[Serializable] public sealed class Person { public string Name; public int Age; }
This sets a special serializable
bit in the metadata
for the type that instructs the runtime to provide serialization and deserialization
support. The [Serializable]
attribute is not inherited,
thus derived types are not automatically serializable. To provide for the
serialization of derived types, mark each type as [Serializable]
.
As we saw earlier in Section 11.4, serializing
a type implicitly serializes all members of the type, recursively. This implies
that all members of a type must themselves be serializable for the type to
successfully serialize. This is true regardless of the accessibility of
the members. For example, if you modify the Person
class
as follows, it will no longer be serializable:
[Serializable] public sealed class Person { public string Name; public int Age; private Company Employer; // Person no longer Serializable! } public class Company {...}
Attempting to serialize an instance of Person
now results in a SerializationException ...
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