Limiting protobuf-net inheritance "tree"

Question

Going on with my quest to bend protobuf-net to my own will..

I've seen a few questions around SO on how to add sub-classes dynamically for the serializer to be able to encode the sub-class.., like this or this

My situation is bit different, I have a base class that might get sub-classed in late-bounded code, and I want to serialize is as the BASE class, and completely ignore the sub-class's fields/properties.

The reason I need this, is that later on, when I deserialize the data, the sub-class's code will not be even available, so constructing the sub-class will not be even possible.

Is there a way to limit/prohibit sub-class serializtion?

In my case I have a List where some items in the list are DerivedClass.

I would like to find a way to make protobuf-net serialize everything as BaseClass and to deserialize to BaseClass as well...

I've tried peering into code, but haven't found something too useful.

Answer 1

Normally, the library is very particular about spotting derived classes - and treating them differently from the base class. The only current exception to that is proxy classes, in particular Entity Framework and NHibernate. For a tidy solution, it would seem practical to add some kind of "ignore subclasses" switch. But while that doesn't exist, a very lazy (and hacky) approach would be to cheat using the existing handling for NHibernate, for example:

namespace NHibernate.Proxy {
    interface INHibernateProxy {}
}
...
public class SomeDerivedType : BaseType, INHibernateProxy {}

this will then automatically be serialized as per BaseType. It does have a faint whiff of cheating about it, though.