Two Notes About Anonymous Types

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

Hugh — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 09:57:45 GMT

I agree with some others here, it would be most helpful to be able to serialize an anonymous type, doing so if all 'member' classes are so marked (as suggested by Matt above) is a very reasonable way of controlling this, or perhaps some compiler option, or even allow 'public' as part of the types 'var' declaration?

In a system that allows arbitrary queries to be run on a server with results sent to a generic client for presentation (e.g. DataGridView) being able to serialize the anonymous query result type is essential.

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

Matt Valerio — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:29:08 GMT

Good points.

I've come to the conclusion that it might be useful to mark anonymous types as serializable.

For example, I was recently trying to reduce the amount of plumbing needed to run a snippet of code in another AppDomain. I turned to anonymous methods and generic classes, and ran into the issue that anonymous types are not marked as serializable and thus can't cross the AppDomain boundaries. Check out this post for some example code that fails.

http://thevalerios.net/matt/2008/06/run-anonymous-methods-in-another-appdomain/

So, how about this:

If any anonymous type is created where ALL of the member property types are marked as Serializable, then also mark the anonymous type’s class as Serializable.

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

Sean — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:07:03 GMT

I'm thinking future extensibility -- what if I could have an anonymous type that performed some anonymous behavior for each of it's properties? perhaps an OnPropertyChanged() similar to rails... it would be somewhat breaking to change the fields to properties...??

"As for binding - I don't see why anyone would want to go through that nightmare."

But people still use untyped datasets *shrug*

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

Omer van Kloeten — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 15:57:34 GMT

Alex / Leon - When a SerializableAttribute is placed on a type, all fields not marked as NotSerialized are used for the type's serialization. Properties are used for binding and maybe that's what threw you off.

Serialization is only useful when you're persisting/reading an object grid to a stream. Since the original intention was for anonymous types to be contained in a single scope, there's no reason to ever serialize them.

Since the type's name/structure isn't deterministic, you can't expect to be able to read it from a stream after having it written somewhere else with zero problems.

As for binding - I don't see why anyone would want to go through that nightmare.

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

lb — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 12:12:12 GMT

>Properties are used for serilization purposes I

>believe. Public fields are not serialized.

this is the glib answer i thought of too ;-)

any response? is serialization still useful with anonymous types?

are these types not likely to be persisted or transmitted (hence serialization is less important)?

re: Two Notes About Anonymous Types

Alex — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:53:34 GMT

Properties are used for serilization purposes I believe. Public fields are not serialized.