CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#serializationpocot4
Simon
Simon

Reputation: 2355

Can serialize, but cannot deserialize?

I've created POCO classes with T4 Templates for EF 4.0 and generated mock for Context. Everything was great, but i don't like to initialize even small Mock-DB in C# code, so i've created some functions which generates Mock-DB from real DB and i wanted to serialize this object and use it later in some Unit Tests...

XML serialization fails, so i've tried binary serialization and serialization succeed, but deserialization failed.

Deserializer cannot find assembly "EntityFrameworkDynamicProxies-". How can i deserialize such thing (DynamicProxy?)...

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3426

Answers (3)

InActive
InActive

Reputation: 842

I was successful able to solve this by registering a custom SerializationBinder with the BinaryFormatter: (EF6)

string file = "data.bin";
using (var ctx = new DataContext())
{
    BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter();
    bf.Binder = new MyBinder();

    Entity e;
    using (var s = File.OpenRead(file))
        e = (Entity)bf.Deserialize(s);

    ctx.Entities.Add(e);
    ctx.SaveChanges();

    File.Move(file, Path.Combine(archiveFolder, Path.GetFileName(file)));
}



class MyBinder : SerializationBinder
{
    Dictionary<string, Type> types;

    public MyBinder()
    {
        types = typeof(Entity).Assembly.GetTypes().Where(t => t.Namespace == "Foo.Model").ToDictionary(t => t.Name, t => t);
    }

    public override Type BindToType(string assemblyName, string typeName)
    {
        if (assemblyName.Contains("EntityFrameworkDynamicProxies-Foo"))
        {
            var type = typeName.Split('.').Last().Split('_').First();
            return types[type];
        }

        var returnType = Type.GetType(String.Format("{0}, {1}", typeName, assemblyName));
        return returnType;
    }
}

Upvotes: 1

Adam Tuliper
Adam Tuliper

Reputation: 30152

If you create your instance of the class first from the entity context in the app the deserializes it, it may work for you. So in your application that is to deserialize this, attempt to do something like

context.YourSerializedObjectType.CreateObject(); where context is an instance of your entity object context.

I had a similar issue I was able to work around (partly) by doing this in an mvc web app's Application_Start

http://completedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/09/aspnetmvcentity-framework-error-unable.html

give it a whirl.

Upvotes: 1

Marc Gravell
Marc Gravell

Reputation: 1063774

Dynamic proxies only exist on-demand, so are poor choices for serialisation. What us the error with XML? Ultimately I expect your best option here is to use a DTO layer, but that might also serialize with some other serializers. For example have you tried DataConttactSerializer, which may be able to cope? I've been adding proxy support to my own serializer but I haven't tried with ef4 yet.

Upvotes: 1

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