I'm currently searching for an easy way to serialize objects (in C# 3).
I googled some examples and came up with something like:
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream ( ); XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer ( typeof ( MyObject) ); XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter ( memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8 ); xs.Serialize ( xmlTextWriter, myObject); string result = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(memoryStream .ToArray());
After reading this question I asked myself, why not using StringWriter? It seems much easier.
XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyObject)); StringWriter writer = new StringWriter(); ser.Serialize(writer, myObject); serializedValue = writer.ToString();
Another Problem was, that the first example generated XML I could not just write into an XML column of SQL Server 2005 DB.
The first question is: Is there a reason why I shouldn't use StringWriter to serialize an Object when I need it as a string afterwards? I never found a result using StringWriter when googling.
The second is, of course: If you should not do it with StringWriter (for whatever reasons), which would be a good and correct way?
As it was already mentioned by both answers, I'll further go into the XML to DB problem.
When writing to the Database I got the following exception:
System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: XML parsing: line 1, character 38, unable to switch the encoding
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><test/>
I took the string created from the XmlTextWriter and just put as xml there. This one did not work (neither with manual insertion into the DB).
Afterwards I tried manual insertion (just writing INSERT INTO ... ) with encoding="utf-16" which also failed. Removing the encoding totally worked then. After that result I switched back to the StringWriter code and viola - it worked.
Problem: I don't really understand why.
at Christian Hayter: With those tests I'm not sure that I have to use utf-16 to write to the DB. Wouldn't setting the encoding to UTF-16 (in the xml tag) work then?