How to Serialize Internal Classes Using Xmlserializer

Serialization of internal class to xml

Hackish but you could make your class public and mark it with EditorBrowsable attribute to hide it from intellisense.

[EditorBrowsable(System.ComponentModel.EditorBrowsableState.Never)]
[Serializable]
public class InternalSerializable

In C#, EditorBrowsable work only on compiled assemblies : Hiding GetHashCode/Equals/ToString from fluent interface classes intellisense in Visual Studio for C#?

Serialize List of classes declared with internal modifier?

You're on the right track... except that the actual serialization is not performed by System.Xml, but by a dynamically generated assembly. You can't predict the name of that assembly (it's randomly generated), so you can't use it in the InternalsVisibleTo attribute.

The only solution is to pre-generate the XML serialization assembly. You can do that using the XML Serializer Generator Tool (Sgen.exe). The name of the generated assembly will be "YourAssembly.XmlSerializers" ; that's the name you have to use in the InternalsVisibleTo attribute.

XML deserialisation fails with nested classes (inner classes)

The problem is solved and it had nothing to do with deserialisation of nested classes:

In one of my classes (AgainAnotherClass), I had following source code:

  [XmlElement(ElementName = "SA")]
  [XmlElement(ElementName = "SA")]
  public string SomeAttribute { get; set; }

(a typical case of Copy/Paste)

The fact that I had two lines with XmlElement caused the problem.

The exception looked as follows:

  InnerException: {"There was an error reflecting field 'f_Inside'."}
  Message: "There was an error reflecting type '<NameSpace>.AgainOtherClass'."

The InnerException made me believe that there was a problem with the nested class, while the Message spoke about a completely other class. I decided to follow the InnerException.

That was wrong! So, in case of C# exceptions where InnerException and Message contradict each other, first check the Message, then (maybe) the InnerException.

Serialize Nested Classes in c#?

What you really want serialize is this :

    Person p = new Person();
    p.Name = _name;
    p.Age = _age;
    Adress a = new Adress();

But these variables are local.
Create a property of each one and decorate them with the serializable attribute too. Now it will work.

public SampleClass(string _name, byte _age, string _street, int _number)
{
    this.Person = new Person();
    Person p = this.Person;
    p.Name = _name;
    p.Age = _age;
    this.Adress = new Adress();
    Adress a = this.Adress;
    a.Street = _street;
    a.Number = _number;
}

[Serializable]
public Person Person { get; set; }
[Serializable]
public Adress Adress { get; set; }

BTW: Address takes 2 d.

How to serialize object in XML while flattening the internal hierarchy of properties within

This should do it

void Main()
{
    var foo = new Foo
    {
        Name = "name",
        fooType = "type",
        BarObject = new Bar { BarString = "bar"}
    };

    var s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Foo));
    using (var writer = new StringWriter())
    {
        s.Serialize(writer, foo);
        writer.ToString().Dump();
    }
}

public class Foo {

    [XmlAttribute("Type")]
    public string fooType;

    [XmlElement("Name")]
    public string Name;

    [XmlElement("Message")]
    public Bar BarObject;
}

public class Bar {

    [XmlText]
    public string BarString;
}

The output is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<Foo xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" Type="type">
  <Name>name</Name>
  <Message>bar</Message>
</Foo>

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