.NET & XML

SOAP Serialization

There’s another form of XML serialization, which may seem redundant at first. You’ll recall that runtime serialization was able to encode an object using SOAP. The SoapFormatter produced a SOAP stream that was optimized for recreating the original object in another .NET application; specifically, the object and all its members were encoded using CLR types. A non-.NET application reading that SOAP stream would most likely have no idea what to do with the data.

However, the XmlSerializer can also serialize an object to SOAP, with an emphasis on the standard SOAP encodings. With SOAP serialization, you get all the interoperability of XML, with additional CLR awareness. The key to standards-compliant SOAP serialization is the SoapReflectionImporter class.

The .NET Framework SDK Documentation will tell you that SoapReflectionImporter is reserved for internal use, and should not be used by your application. However, it does have one constructor and one method that you can use to serialize objects to SOAP.

The code in Example 9-9 demonstrates how to serialize the personnel records from earlier examples to SOAP, using the same Personnel class and the CreatePersonnel( ) method from before.

Example 9-9. Serializing personnel records to SOAP

public static void Main(string [ ] args) { Personnel personnel = CreatePersonnel( ); SoapReflectionImporter importer = new SoapReflectionImporter( ); XmlTypeMapping mapping = importer.ImportTypeMapping(typeof(Personnel)); XmlSerializer ...