Do Azure table services entities have an equivalent of NonSerializedAttribute?

Question

If I\'m trying to serialize a normal CLR object, and I do not want a particular member variable to be serialized, I can tag it with the

[NonSerialized]
         


        

Answer 1

For version 2.0 of the Table Storage SDK there is a new way to achieve this.

You can now override the WriteEntity method on TableEntity and remove any entity properties that have an attribute on them. I derive from a class that does this for all my entities, like:

public class CustomSerializationTableEntity : TableEntity
{
    public CustomSerializationTableEntity()
    {
    }

    public CustomSerializationTableEntity(string partitionKey, string rowKey)
        : base(partitionKey, rowKey)
    {
    }

    public override IDictionary WriteEntity(Microsoft.WindowsAzure.Storage.OperationContext operationContext)
    {
        var entityProperties = base.WriteEntity(operationContext);

        var objectProperties = this.GetType().GetProperties();

        foreach (PropertyInfo property in objectProperties)
        {
            // see if the property has the attribute to not serialization, and if it does remove it from the entities to send to write
            object[] notSerializedAttributes = property.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(NotSerializedAttribute), false);
            if (notSerializedAttributes.Length > 0)
            {
                entityProperties.Remove(property.Name);
            }
        }

        return entityProperties;
    }
}

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Property)]
public class NotSerializedAttribute : Attribute
{
}

Then you can make use of this class for your entities like

public class MyEntity : CustomSerializationTableEntity
{
     public MyEntity()
     {
     }

     public string MySerializedProperty { get; set; }

     [NotSerialized]
     public List MyNotSerializedProperty { get; set; }
}