How to quickly save/load class instance to file

Question

I have several collections of classes/structs in my app.

The class is just a class with fields

class A
{
  public int somevalue;
  public string someothervalue
}

And my collection

List<A> _myList;

I need to be able to save _myList and load. I just want to save all class fields to file and load. I don't want to spend time writing my own save/load. Are there any tools in .NET to help me. I don't care about the file format.

Answer 1

XMLSerializer isn't hard to use. As long as your objects aren't huge, it's pretty quick. I serialize out some huge objects in a few of my apps. It takes forever and the resulting files are almost 100 megs, but they're editable should I need to tweak some stuff. Plus it doesn't matter if I add fields to my objects. The serialized files of the older version of the object still deserialize properly.. I do the serialization on a separate thread so it doesn't matter how long it takes in my case. The caveat is that your A class has to have a constructor for XMLSerialziation to work.

Here's some working code I use to serialize/deserialize with the error handling ripped out for readibility...

private List<A> Load()
{
    string file = "filepath";
    List<A> listofa = new List<A>();
    XmlSerializer formatter = new XmlSerializer(A.GetType());
    FileStream aFile = new FileStream(file, FileMode.Open);
    byte[] buffer = new byte[aFile.Length];
    aFile.Read(buffer, 0, (int)aFile.Length);
    MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(buffer);
    return (List<A>)formatter.Deserialize(stream);
}


private void Save(List<A> listofa)
{
    string path = "filepath";
    FileStream outFile = File.Create(path);
    XmlSerializer formatter = new XmlSerializer(A.GetType());
    formatter.Serialize(outFile, listofa);
}