Is It possible to perform serialization with circular references?

Question

So, my entity class (written in C#) follows a parent child model where every child object must have a Parent property in which it keeps reference of its Parent.

This Parent property causes issues in serialization of the Object due to circular references.

I can't remove the reference to parent, neither I can mark it XmlIgnore (since I need to read it back when I deserialize the XML)

Any ideas on this?

Thomas Levesque · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-09T12:52:03.797

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XML serialization doesn't support circular references, you need to exclude the parent property from the serialization using the XmlIgnore attribute. See this blog post for a way to maintain the relationship when you deserialize.

Alternatively, you could use DataContractSerializer instead of XmlSerializer. It supports circular references, but doesn't provide much control over the XML schema...

edited Dec 09 '14 at 12:52

answered Feb 15 '11 at 13:52

Thomas Levesque

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nice blog post. trying your example. – Arpit Khandelwal Feb 15 '11 at 14:01
Thanks Thomos, your solution was life saver! – Arpit Khandelwal Feb 15 '11 at 16:51

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 15 '11 at 13:48

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You can either create your own XMLSerializer or use the DataContractSerializer and the [DataContract(IsReference= true)] attribute to tell the serializer to remember the references.

answered Feb 15 '11 at 13:48

Yuriy Faktorovich

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Thanks for response, any example with a piece of code will add more help. :) – Arpit Khandelwal Feb 15 '11 at 13:50

Is It possible to perform serialization with circular references?

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