Coding Stories V - Serialization with XmlArrayItem

Serialization, almost all applications need this feature. Nowadays serialization can be in different formats. The trend now is to use JSON, but there are many applications that uses XML.
Let’s look over the following code:

public class Car
{
  public string Id { get; set; }
}
public class City
{
  [XmlArray("Cs")]
  [XmlArrayItem("C")]
  public List<Car> RegisterCars { get; set; }
}
...
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(City));
serializer.Serialize(writer, city);

Output:

<city>
  <Cs>
    <c>
      <id>1</id>
    <c>
    <c>
      <id>2</id>
    <c>
  <Cs>
</city>

Even if the code compiles, works perfectly, there is a small thing that can affect us. Because we use XmlArrayItem attribute, each node from the list will be named “C”. If we will need to deserialize only a C node then we will have a surprise.
This cannot be done with the default XmlSerializer class.

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Car));
serializer.Deserialize("<c><id>1</id></c>");

This will expect a node named “Car”, that cannot be found there.
Because of this, when we need to control the name of the nodes from a list and I recommend to not use the XmlArrayItem. A better approach is with [XmlRoot(ElementName = "c")] on the Car class. Using this approach, we will be able to deserialize a child node of the list without having to deserialize all the list.
The final code will look like this:

[XmlRoot(ElementName = "c")]
public class Car
{
  public string Id { get; set; }
}
public class City
{
  [XmlArray("Cs")]
  public List<Car> RegisterCars { get; set; }
}

Even if this is a small thing, on a big project this can affect how different components deserialize the content. Deciding how items need to be serialized is an important step that needs to be done from the beginning.