Programming Tutorials

SOAP serialization in C#

By: Jason Price in Csharp Tutorials on 2011-02-04  

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap;

// the Customer class gives us something to serialize
[Serializable]
class Customer
{
  // some private data members
  private int CustomerNumber;
  private string CustomerName;
  private string CustomerCountry;

  // the WriteCustomer method formats info to the screen
  public void WriteCustomer()
  {
    Console.WriteLine("Customer Number: " + this.CustomerNumber);
    Console.WriteLine("Customer Name: " + this.CustomerName);
    Console.WriteLine("Customer Country: " + this.CustomerCountry);
  }

  // the constructor accepts all the info to create a customer
  public Customer(
    int newCustomerNumber, 
    string newCustomerName, 
    string newCustomerCountry)
  {
    this.CustomerNumber = newCustomerNumber;
    this.CustomerName = newCustomerName;
    this.CustomerCountry = newCustomerCountry;
  }
}

public class Example15_20 
{

  public static void Main() 
  {

    // create a new customer and dump to screen
    Customer MyCustomer = new Customer(1, "X Corporation", "France");
    MyCustomer.WriteCustomer();

    // Create a FileStream to hold the serialized customer
    FileStream serializeStream = new FileStream("c:\\MyCustomer.xml", 
      FileMode.Create);

    // use SOAP formatting
    SoapFormatter sf = new SoapFormatter();

    // serialize the object
    sf.Serialize(serializeStream, MyCustomer);
    serializeStream.Flush();
    serializeStream.Close();

    // retrieve the serialized version to a second object and dump that
    FileStream retrieveStream = new FileStream("c:\\MyCustomer.xml",
      FileMode.Open);
    Customer NewCustomer = (Customer) sf.Deserialize(retrieveStream);
    NewCustomer.WriteCustomer();
  }

}