How do you find out when you've been loaded via XML Serialization?

Question

I'm trying to load a tree of objects via XML serialisation, and at the moment it will load the objects in, and create the tree quite happily. My issue revolves around the fact that these classes support a level of auditing. What I'd like to be able to do is call some method on each object after it has finished being loaded. For the sake of argument, assume I have a fairly generic object tree with differing classes at different levels, like: ``` 123 Any Street 456 High Street ``` Is there any way using the default serialisers (In the similar way that you can create methods like `ShouldSerializeFoo`) to determine when loading has finished for each object? Edit: I sho…

Accepted Answer

Hmmm... it's still not pretty but you could refactor your deserialization logic into a dedicated class which could notify the deserialized object that it originated from XML before returning it to the caller.

Update: I think this should be fairly easy to do without straying too far from the patterns laid by the framework... you'd just need to ensure that you use the CustomXmlSerializer. Classes that need this notification just need to implement IXmlDeserializationCallback

```
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace Custom.Xml.Serialization
{
    public interface IXmlDeserializationCallback
    {
        void OnXmlDeserialization(object sender);
    }

public class CustomXmlSerializer : XmlSerializer
    {
        protected override object Deserialize(XmlSerializationReader reader)
        {
            var result = base.Deserialize(reader);

var deserializedCallback = result as IXmlDeserializationCallback;
            if (deserializedCallback != null)
            {
                deserializedCallback.OnXmlDeserialization(this);
            }

return result;
        }
    }
}
```

How do you find out when you've been loaded via XML Serialization?

Solution

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