protobuf-net serialization without attributes

Question

I have an assembly with DataContracts and I need to generate .proto schema for it to be able to exchange the data with java system. The DataContracts code can be changed but I cannot add [ProtoContract] and [ProtoMember] attributes in it because it will result in protobuf-net assembly dependency. We use WCF in C# parts of the system so we would not want to have dependency on proto-buf assembly in most of C# projects that don't work with java system.

On the protobuf-net site in a GettingStarted section it's said that:

Don't Like Attributes?
In v2, everything that can be done with attributes can also be configured at runtime via RuntimeTypeModel.

However I've no clue how to actually configure serialization without attributes and I haven't seen any examples of that.

I'm trying to do

[DataContract]
public class MyEntity
{
    [DataMember(Order = 1)]
    public String PropertyA { get; set; }

    [DataMember(Order = 2)]
    public int PropertyB { get; set; }
}

RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(MyEntity), false);

string proto = Serializer.GetProto<MyEntity>();

And get the following as the value of proto

package ProtobufTest;

message MyEntity {
}

Answer 1

Clarification: most of this answer relates to the pre-edit question, where false was passed to RuntimeTypeModel.Add(...)

---

I've used your exact code (I inferred that this was in namespace ProtobufTest, but the rest was copy/paste from the question) with r2.0.0.640 (the current NuGet deployment), and I get:

package ProtobufTest;

message MyEntity {
   optional string PropertyA = 1;
   optional int32 PropertyB = 2 [default = 0];
}

Further, you get the exact same result even if you remove the RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(...) line.

It is unclear to me why you are seeing something different - can you clarify:

• which protobuf-net version you are using exactly
• if those [DataContract] / [DataMember] attributes are the System.Runtime.Serialization.dll ones, or your own (sorry if that seems a bizarre question)

To answer the question fully: if you couldn't have any attributes (and the ones you have are just fine), you could also do:

RuntimeTypeModel.Default.Add(typeof(MyEntity), false)
    .Add(1, "PropertyA")
    .Add(2, "PropertyB");

which would configure PropertyA as key 1, and PropertyB as key 2.