Easily write a whole class instance to XML File and read back in

Question

I have a main class called theGarage, which contains instances of our customer, supplier, and jobs classes.

I want to save the program data to an XML file, I have used the code below (just a snippet, I have matching code for the other classes). I am wondering if there is an easier way for me to do this, like write the whole theGarage class to an XML file and read it in without having to write all this code like I have below.

   public void saveToFile()
    {
        using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create("theGarage.xml"))
        {
            writer.WriteStartDocument();

            ///
            writer.WriteStartElement("theGarage");
            writer.WriteStartElement("Customers");

            foreach (Customer Customer in Program.theGarage.Customers)
            {
                writer.WriteStartElement("Customer");
                writer.WriteElementString("FirstName", Customer.FirstName);
                writer.WriteElementString("LastName", Customer.LastName);
                writer.WriteElementString("Address1", Customer.Address1);
                writer.WriteElementString("Address2", Customer.Address2);
                writer.WriteElementString("Town", Customer.Town);
                writer.WriteElementString("County", Customer.County);
                writer.WriteElementString("PostCode", Customer.Postcode);
                writer.WriteElementString("TelephoneHome", Customer.TelephoneHome);
                writer.WriteElementString("TelephoneMob", Customer.TelephoneMob);

                //begin vehicle list
                writer.WriteStartElement("Vehicles");

                foreach (Vehicle Vehicle in Customer.Cars)
                {
                    writer.WriteStartElement("Vehicle");
                    writer.WriteElementString("Make", Vehicle.Make);
                    writer.WriteElementString("Model", Vehicle.Model);
                    writer.WriteElementString("Colour", Vehicle.Colour);
                    writer.WriteElementString("EngineSize", Vehicle.EngineSize);
                    writer.WriteElementString("Registration", Vehicle.Registration);
                    writer.WriteElementString("Year", Vehicle.YearOfFirstReg);
                    writer.WriteEndElement();
                }
                writer.WriteEndElement();
                writer.WriteEndElement();
            }
        }
    }

Answer 1

There is much simpler way of serializing objects, use XmlSerializer instead. See documentation here.

Code snippet to serialize your garage to file could look like:

var garage = new theGarage();

// TODO init your garage..

XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(theGarage));
TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(@"c:\temp\garage.xml");
xs.Serialize(tw, garage);

And code to load garage from file:

using(var sr = new StreamReader(@"c:\temp\garage.xml"))
{
   garage = (theGarage)xs.Deserialize(sr);
}