How to exclude null properties when using XmlSerializer

Question

I'm serializing a class like this

public MyClass {     public int? a { get; set; }     public int? b { get; set; }     public int? c { get; set; } } 

All of the types are nullable because I want minimal data stored when serializing an object of this type. However, when it is serialized with only "a" populated, I get the following xml

<MyClass ...>     <a>3</a>     <b xsi:nil="true" />     <c xsi:nil="true" /> </MyClass> 

How do I set this up to only get xml for the non null properties? The desired output would be

<MyClass ...>     <a>3</a> </MyClass> 

I want to exclude these null values because there will be several properties and this is getting stored in a database (yeah, thats not my call) so I want to keep the unused data minimal.

Answer 1

You ignore specific elements with specification

public MyClass {     public int? a { get; set; }      [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnore]     public bool aSpecified { get { return this.a != null; } }      public int? b { get; set; }     [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnore]     public bool bSpecified { get { return this.b != null; } }      public int? c { get; set; }     [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlIgnore]     public bool cSpecified { get { return this.c != null; } } } 

The {field}Specified properties will tell the serializer if it should serialize the corresponding fields or not by returning true/false.