Entities used to serialize data have changed. How can the serialized data be upgraded for the new entities?
- by i8abug
Hi,
I have a bunch of simple entity instances that I have serialized to a file. In the future, I know that the structure of these entities (ie, maybe I will rename Name to Header or something). The thing is, I don't want to lose the data that I have saved in all these old files. What is the proper way to either
load the data from the old entities into new entities
upgrade the old files so that they can be used with new entities
Note: I think I am stuck with binary serialization, not xml serialization.
Thanks in advance!
Edit: So I have an answer for the case I have described. I can use a dataContractSerializer and do something like
[DataMember("bar")]
private string foo;
and change the name in the code and keep the same name that was used for serialization. But what about the following additional cases:
The original entity has new members which can be serialized
Some serialized members that were in the original entity are removed
Some members have actually changed in function (suppose that the original class had a FirstName and LastName member and it has been refactored to have only a FullName member which combines the two)
To handle these, I need some sort of interpreter/translator deserialization class but I have no idea what I should use
