C# 5.0 Programmer's Reference

XML Serialization ❘ 569
Each Order element holds other elements that contain information about the program’s
Order object. The OrderItems element holds a sequence of OrderItem objects to represent
an OrderItem object’s OrderItems array.
Obvious XML
The XML serialization’s structure is so intuitive that you could easily serialize and
deserialize objects yourself by hand if necessary. The only remarkable thing about it is
that it all happens automatically. You don’t need to tell the serializer what properties
and fields the Customer, Order, and OrderItem classes have; what their data types
are; or whether they are simple values (such as int and string) or complex values
(such as OrderItem and List). The serializer figures that out all by itself.
The serializer uses reflection to analyze the classes and determine what values it must
save and what their names are. You’ll learn how your programs can use reflection in
the next chapter.
Controlling Serialization
The serialization shown in the preceding section is straightforward and reasonably intuitive, but
there are times when you might want to change the way an object is serialized.
For example, the previous serialization is easy to understand but it’s quite verbose. Perhaps you
would rather store this data:
Like this:
Tape
12
0.75
The result is more concise and possibly easier to read.
For another example, suppose your program saves a customer’s order data and you want to use
that data in another program. Unfortunately, the other program stores a Customer object’s order
information in an Order[] named CustomerOrders instead of a List named Orders.
At this point you might realize that you could use XSLT to transform your serialization into a format
that the other program could deserialize. That would certainly work (and would let you make other
transformations that you can’t with the techniques that follow) but it would be extra work and require
another processing step.
Fortunately, the System.Xml.Serialization namespace defines attributes that you can use to gain
some control over the serialization process. You add these attributes to classes or the properties and
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