Explicit Serialization
Consider a case in which a client wants to serialize a complex graph
of objects to a file on disk. Furthermore, let’s
assume that the objects already support serialization (if not, the
client’s job is much harder). Fundamentally, there
are two things the client needs to initiate an explicit
serialization: an object
reference identifying the
root of the object graph, and a Stream
reference
identifying the place to serialize the object graph to.
Given these two references, the client needs some way to initiate the
serialization and deserialization process. Since this is a common
need, the Framework defines a standard interface called
IFormatter
that provides
Serialize
and Deserialize
methods that work in terms of object
and
Stream
references.
The Framework also provides two concrete implementations of this
interface: the BinaryFormatter
class (which lives
in the
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary
namespace, and serializes object graphs using a binary format), and
the SoapFormatter
class (which lives in the
System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap
namespace, and serializes object graphs as XML using SOAP Section 5
encoding rules).
Using these classes, clients can serialize graphs of objects with almost no code:
public void SerializeGraph(string file, object root) { Stream stm = new FileStream(file, FileMode.Create); IFormatter fmt = new BinaryFormatter( ); fmt.Serialize(stm, root); stm.Flush( ); stm.Close( ); }
When passed a target filename and the ...
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