In his blog post Serialize and deserialize objects as xml using generic types in C# 2.0 , Paul Whitaker creates some ubiquitous functions for doing Xml Serialization with generics.
To serialize:
Dim lsXml As String = GenericXmlSerializer.SerializeObject(of MyObjectType)(myObject)
To deserialize:
Dim myObject As MyObjectType = GenericXmlSerializer.DeserializeObject(of MyObjectType)(lsXml)
Here’s the code
Imports System.Collections.Generic Class GenericXmlSerializer Dim encoding As New UTF8Encoding End Function ''' <summary> Dim encoding As New UTF8Encoding() ''' <summary> Try Dim memoryStream As New MemoryStream() Return xmlString Return String.Empty ''' <summary> Dim xs As New XmlSerializer(GetType(T)) Dim theObject As T = CType(xs.Deserialize(memoryStream), T) End Function End Class
Imports System.Text
Imports System.Xml
Imports System.IO
Imports System.Xml.Serialization
''' <summary>
''' To convert a Byte Array of Unicode values (UTF-8 encoded) to a complete String.
''' </summary>
''' <param name="characters">Unicode Byte Array to be converted to String</param>
''' <returns>String converted from Unicode Byte Array</returns>
Public Shared Function UTF8ByteArrayToString(ByVal characters As Byte()) As String
Dim constructedString As String = encoding.GetString(characters)
Return constructedString
''' Converts the String to UTF8 Byte array and is used in De serialization
''' </summary>
''' <param name="pXmlString"></param>
''' <returns></returns>
Public Shared Function StringToUTF8ByteArray(ByVal pXmlString As String) As Byte()
Dim byteArray As Byte() = encoding.GetBytes(pXmlString)
Return byteArray
End Function
''' Serialize an object into an XML string
''' </summary>
''' <typeparam name="T"></typeparam>
''' <param name="obj"></param>
''' <returns></returns>
Public Shared Function SerializeObject(Of T)(ByVal obj As T) As String
Dim xmlString As String = Nothing
Dim xs As New XmlSerializer(GetType(T))
Dim xmlTextWriter As New XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8)
xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, obj)
memoryStream = CType(xmlTextWriter.BaseStream, MemoryStream)
xmlString = UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray())
memoryStream.Dispose()
Catch
End Try
End Function
''' Reconstruct an object from an XML string
''' </summary>
''' <param name="xml"></param>
''' <returns></returns>
Public Shared Function DeserializeObject(Of T)(ByVal xml As String) As T
Dim memoryStream As New MemoryStream(StringToUTF8ByteArray(xml))
Dim xmlTextWriter As New XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8)
memoryStream.Dispose()
Return theObject
Rather than be original, I converted most of his code verbatim and have found the functions useful.
I offer them to you warranty free, unadorned and hopefully useful.
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