The deserializer has no knowlege of any type that maps to this contract

Question

I\'m trying to serialize and deserialize a tree of Node objects. My abstract \"Node\" class as well as other abstract and concrete classes that derive from it are defined in

Answer 1

Alright here's a diagram that should make things more clear. I'm developing a plugin for another program that adds relationships and properties not already included in the program. These relationships/properties are defined in my tree structure. However, I'm trying to define this structure abstractly so that I could create implementations of the plugin for different programs, as well as access the information from multiple implementations in a single "viewer" program.

My Serialize/Deserialize methods are defined in the framework, but the framework does not know about all the implementations. I was hoping I could avoid having the implementation projects pass a list of types to the save/open/serialize/deserialize methods in the framework project, but it seems I can't avoid this? I guess that make sense though, the serialize/deserialize methods must have access to the types they are deserializing.

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/113068/informa_framework.jpg <---Larger Version alt text http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/113068/informa_framework.jpg

So this doesn't really explain the problem with Building, as it is a concrete class in the framework project. I think what is happening is when I serialize the DataContractSerializer has access to all the objects and their KnowType parameter and saves them correctly. But when I deserialize I create my DataContractSerializer with Dictionary as the type. So it only knows about Nodes, but not the derived classes of nodes.

new DataContractSerializer(typeof(Dictionary))

I can't tell it what all the derived types are because like I said they are in other projects that the framework project doesn't know about. Soooooooo seems like the best solution is to have each implementation pass a list of Node types it uses to the serialization and deserialization methods in the framework project.

Does this make sense? Is there a better way to do this?