Hot to put a custom object into the ViewState or how to serialize an object
In order to access an object even after postbacks, you need to put it either in the Session or the ViewState. The ViewState is preserved only between postbacks, not between different pages and it is a Page property, so it is more efficient to use it. The problem with this method is that every object you put in the ViewState must be serializable.
So, the quick and dirty path: if you don't have strange custom serializing to do, all you have to do it to decorate the object with the [Serializable] flag, like this:
Say you wouldn't have done this, you would have probably met with the "Class is not marked as Serializable". Duh!. However, in this situation above I have inherited from an object that implements ISerializable. I will get an error "The constructor to deserialize an object of type ... was not found". What that means is that the object must have a constructor that accepts two parameters, a SerializationInfo and a StreamingContext object. So we must add it to the object, like this:
I added the second constructor because when adding a parametrized constructor, the default empty one is no longer inherited. So no more new MyDictionary() unless one adds it.
That does it! Please do check out the entire ISerializable interface documentation, since it requires, besides the constructor, a GetObjectData method, with the same parameters as the constructor, which controls the custom serialization of the object.
So, the quick and dirty path: if you don't have strange custom serializing to do, all you have to do it to decorate the object with the [Serializable] flag, like this:
[Serializable]
public class MyDictionary StateDict:Dictionary<int,bool> {
}
Say you wouldn't have done this, you would have probably met with the "Class is not marked as Serializable". Duh!. However, in this situation above I have inherited from an object that implements ISerializable. I will get an error "The constructor to deserialize an object of type ... was not found". What that means is that the object must have a constructor that accepts two parameters, a SerializationInfo and a StreamingContext object. So we must add it to the object, like this:
[Serializable]
public class MyDictionary StateDict:Dictionary<int,bool> {
public MyDictionary(SerializationInfo info, StreamingContext context) : base(info, context) { }
public MyDictionary() {}}
I added the second constructor because when adding a parametrized constructor, the default empty one is no longer inherited. So no more new MyDictionary() unless one adds it.
That does it! Please do check out the entire ISerializable interface documentation, since it requires, besides the constructor, a GetObjectData method, with the same parameters as the constructor, which controls the custom serialization of the object.
Comments
You're most welcome. Serialization is hard if you want it done right.
SideriteThis helped me five years later. Thank you for a simple straight-forward answer! I'd just switched an app from InProc to SQL storage and after the first few hurdles I was considering jacking it in... turns out it wasn't that painful.
Anonymous