DataContractSerializer and immutable types. Deserialising to a known object instance

Question

I have a class that is effectively a object based enum. There is a static set of objects exposed by the class, and everything uses these same instances. eg (Note the private constructor)

[DataContract]
public class FieldType
{
    public static readonly FieldType Default  = new FieldType(1, "Default");
    public static readonly FieldType Name     = new FieldType(2, "Name");
    public static readonly FieldType Etc      = new FieldType(3, "Etc");

    private FieldType(uint id, string name)
    {
        Id = id;
        Name = name;
    }

    [DataMember] public uint   Id   { get; private set; }
    [DataMember] public string Name { get; private set; }
    //snip other properties
}

This works great until I have to serialise across WCF. The DataContractSerializer creates new objects by bypassing the constructor. This results in a valid FieldType object, but it is a new instance that is not one of my static instances. This makes reference comparisons against the known static values fail.

Is there any way to override the serialisation behaviour for a class so that I create the object instance instead of populating an instance supplied to me?

Answer 1

I suspect you can do:

[DataContract]
public class FieldType : IObjectReference
{
    object IObjectReference.GetRealObject(StreamingContext ctx)
        switch(Id) {
            case 1: return Default;
            case 2: return Name; // note this is a collision between static/non-static
            case 3: return Etc;
            default: throw new InvalidOperationException();
        }
    }
    public static readonly FieldType Default  = new FieldType(1, "Default");
    // note this is a collision between static/non-static
    public static readonly FieldType Name     = new FieldType(2, "Name");
    public static readonly FieldType Etc      = new FieldType(3, "Etc");

    private FieldType(uint id, string name)
    {
        Id = id;
        Name = name; // note this is a collision between static/non-static
    }

    [DataMember] public uint   Id   { get; private set; }
    // note this is a collision between static/non-static
    [DataMember] public string Name { get; private set; }
    //snip other properties
}

Validated:

public static class Program
{
    static void Main()
    {
        var obj = FieldType.Default;

        using(var ms = new MemoryStream())
        {
            var ser = new DataContractSerializer(typeof (FieldType));
            ser.WriteObject(ms, obj);
            ms.Position = 0;
            var obj2 = ser.ReadObject(ms);

            bool pass = ReferenceEquals(obj, obj2); // true
        }
    }
}

Note, however, that there seems little point serializing the Name if we only use the Id to identify the real object to use.