AppFabric Caching - Can I specify serialization style used for all objects?

Question

An object which implements some custom serialization can be serialized and deserialized to different formats, for example to Xml or byte[].

I have run into a problem where when I put to cache, AppFabric runs the IXmlSerializable implementation on a class when I would rather force it to go with binary. AppFabric Caching - What are its serialization and deserialization requirements for an object?

Can I configure this?

(At the moment the workaround is to serialize the object programatically to a byte[] and then send that into the cache, reversing the process on the way out).

Answer 1

In the MSDN documentation it says we could implement IDataCacheObjectSerializer to achieve this goal. You can read about it here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/hh552969.aspx

class MySerializer : IDataCacheObjectSerializer
{
    public object Deserialize(System.IO.Stream stream)
    {
        // Deserialize the System.IO.Stream 'stream' from
        // the cache and return the object 
    }

    public void Serialize(System.IO.Stream stream, object value)
    {
        // Serialize the object 'value' into a System.IO.Stream
        // that can be stored in the cache
    }
}

Afer that, you can set the custom serializer to the DataCacheFactory:

DataCacheFactoryConfiguration configuration = new DataCacheFactoryConfiguration();

configuration.SerializationProperties = 
   new DataCacheSerializationProperties(DataCacheObjectSerializerType.CustomSerializer, 
   new MyNamespace.MySerializer());

// Assign other DataCacheFactoryConfiguration properties...

// Then create a DataCacheFactory with this configuration
DataCacheFactory factory = new DataCacheFactory(configuration);

Hope this helps.