Protobuf-net serialization without annotation

Question

I looked at this answer and I am in a situation where I don\'t need to maintain backward compatibility and I have to have a solution that works without having to decorate do

Answer 1

InferTagFromName (and it's twin, InferTagFromNameDefault) only take a hand when it is necessary to resolve a tag number for a member; they don't influence which members need to be serialized (so currently the answer to that would be: none, even if the system knew about them). The option you might have chosen would be ImplicitFields, but that is currently only available as a [ProtoContract(...)] marker. If you don't mind a little annotation, a pragmatic fix may be:

[ProtoContract(ImplicitFields = ImplicitFields.AllPublic)]

on User, Company and Product, and something a bit more complex for BaseUser (because of the inheritance):

[ProtoContract(ImplicitFields = ImplicitFields.AllPublic, ImplicitFirstTag = 10)]
[ProtoInclude(1, typeof(User))]

Note we haven't had to add lots of per-member annotation. If you are really really anti-attributes, then it is also possible to configure the entire model through code, via:

RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(Product), false).Add("Name", "Sku");
RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(Company), false).Add("Name", "Address",
         "Type", "Products");
RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(User), false).Add("FirstName", "LastName",
         "Age", "BirthDate", "Friends", "Company");
RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(BaseUser), false).Add(10, "SSN")
         .AddSubType(1, typeof(User));