Serializing and deserializing a List> with BinaryFormatter

Question

Let's say I have

List<object> mainList = new List<object>();

And it contains

List<string> stringList = new List<string();
List<CustomClass> custList = new List<CustomClass>();
mainList.Add(stringList);
mainList.Add(custList);

To serialize

Stream stream;
BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
formatter.Serialize(stream, mainList);

To deserialize

Stream stream = (Stream)o;
BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
List<object> retrievedList = (List<object>)formatter.Deserialize(stream);

At this point, I receive an error that the stream read (deserialization) reached the end of the stream without retrieving a value.

Do I need to specify something besides...

[Serializable]
public class CustomClass { .... }

in the custom class to make this work? Can I not deserialize a List> that contains different type of object every time?

I tried

IList list = (IList)Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(custClassList[0]))

and tried to send and receive this, but got the same issue.

I can however serialize and deserialize a specified type or List, but I really need it to be dynamic.

without `Serializable` attribute or implementing `ISerializable` interface you can't serialize a Type with `BinaryFormatter` — Sriram Sakthivel, Sep 18 '13 at 15:24
what Sriram Sakthivel suggested ;) but your code would not even compile if you had it like posted in your question so I think you meant `Deserialize` anyway (with a cast of course) — olydis, Sep 18 '13 at 15:30

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

3

Basically, BinaryFormatter is a joke. It works in some cases, but will fail in almost identical scenarios for unknown reasons.

The best and superior alternative to BinaryFormatter is the third-party library protobuf-net (https://github.com/mgravell/protobuf-net), developed by Marc Gravel.

This beauty solved all the problems I was having in one pass. It's much easier to set up and reacts more perfectly to complex, custom classes.

I should also mention that it's faster, in the terms of de/serialization.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:09

Community

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answered Sep 24 '13 at 18:40

Glimpse

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"usually" faster. I've found if you've got large arrays of primitives (eg int[]) then BinaryFormatter is faster than Protobuf.Net – mcmillab Nov 11 '13 at 22:08
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Protobuf-net (at least the .net port) was created by Marc Gravell, not google. It just happens to be hosted on google.code. – Phil Cooper Dec 22 '14 at 14:31

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 18 '13 at 15:41

In order to fix the issue that causes the error "stream read (deserialization) reached the end of the stream ", the stream position needs to reset to 0 as follows...

stream.Position = 0;

Do I need to specify something besides...

[Serializable] public class CustomClass { .... }

Nope...That should be good for what you are doing.

in the custom class to make this work? Can I not deserialize a List> that contains different type of object every time?

You should be able to serialize any object.

I've tried that. I'm reading from a NamedPipeServerStream that's been written to by a NamedPipeClientStream, which will give me an error saying that it "can't seek." — Glimpse, Sep 18 '13 at 15:46

Serializing and deserializing a List> with BinaryFormatter

2 Answers2