Customizing the serialization engines

Since the SerializerBase does all the heavy lifting, it is very easy to customize the behavior of an existing serializer or create a completely new one. Each serializer implements its own interface and are registered in the ServiceLocator using the following interfaces:

• XmlSerializer => IXmlSerializer
• BinarySerializer => IBinarySerializer

To customize a serializer, derive from an existing class and customize a method. The serializer below makes sure that specific members are never serialized. It keeps all other serialization logic intact.

public class SafeXmlSerializer : XmlSerializer
{
    protected override bool ShouldIgnoreMember(ModelBase model, PropertyData property)
    {
        if (model is SecurityModel)
        {
            if (string.Equals(property.Name, "Password"))
            {
                return true;
            }
        }
        return base.ShouldIgnoreProperty(model, property);
    }
}

The only thing to do now is to register this custom instance in the ServiceLocator:

ServiceLocator.Default.RegisterType<IXmlSerializer, SafeXmlSerializer>();

The following methods on the serializer classes might be of interest when customizing the serialization:

• ShouldIgnoreProperty
  
  
• BeforeSerialization
• BeforeSerializeProperty
• AfterSerializeProperty
• AfterSerialization
  
  
• BeforeDeserialization
• BeforeDeserializeProperty
• AfterDeserializeProperty
• AfterDeserialization