StackOverflowException is thrown when serialising circular dependent ISerializable object with ReferenceLoopHandling.Ignore

Question

I have a legacy application that used binary serialisation to persist the data. Now we wanted to use Json.net 4.5 to serialise the data without much changes to the existing

Answer 1

I think you'll need both ReferenceLoopHandling.Serialize and PreserveReferencesHandling.All to replicate the behavior of binary serialization. The resulting JSON may not be nearly as pretty, though.

EDIT: I've looked deeper into JSON.Net 4.5r10 and discovered a deficiency: JsonSerializerInternalWriter doesn't check #ShouldWriteReference for references obtained via ISerializable.

With the foreach loop in #SerializeISerializable rewritten as below, your object graph round-trips successfully.

  foreach (SerializationEntry serializationEntry in serializationInfo)
  {
    writer.WritePropertyName(serializationEntry.Name);
    var entryValue = serializationEntry.Value;
    var valueContract = GetContractSafe(entryValue);
    if (ShouldWriteReference(entryValue, null, valueContract, null, member))
    {
      WriteReference(writer, entryValue);
    }
    else
    {
      SerializeValue(writer, entryValue, valueContract, null, null, member);
    }
  }

Answer 2

Did you try this?

[Serializable]
 class Employee : ISerializable
 {
   [NonSerialized]
   [XmlIgnore]
   public Department Department { get; set; }

NonSerialized Indicates that a field of a serializable class should not be serialized.

XmlIgnore Instructs the Serialize method of the XmlSerializer not to serialize the public field or public read/write property value