Serializing a ConcurrentBag of XAML

.net, c#, concurrency, wpf, xaml

Solution

Here are some extensions methods that handle string and binary serialization of `Point3DCollection` bags. As I said in my comment, I don't think there is a best way of doing this in all cases, so you might want to try both. Also note they're using `Stream` parameter as input so you can chain these with calls to GZipStream of DeflateStream.

public static class Point3DExtensions
{
    public static void StringSerialize(this ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> bag, Stream stream)
    {
        if (bag == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("bag");

        if (stream == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("stream");

        StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(stream);
        Point3DCollectionConverter converter = new Point3DCollectionConverter();
        foreach (Point3DCollection coll in bag)
        {
            // we need to use the english locale as the converter needs that for parsing...
            string line = (string)converter.ConvertTo(null, CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("en-US"), coll, typeof(string));
            writer.WriteLine(line);
        }
        writer.Flush();
    }

    public static void StringDeserialize(this ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> bag, Stream stream)
    {
        if (bag == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("bag");

        if (stream == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("stream");

        StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
        Point3DCollectionConverter converter = new Point3DCollectionConverter();
        do
        {
            string line = reader.ReadLine();
            if (line == null)
                break;

            bag.Add((Point3DCollection)converter.ConvertFrom(line));

            // NOTE: could also use this:
            //bag.Add(Point3DCollection.Parse(line));
        }
        while (true);
    }

    public static void BinarySerialize(this ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> bag, Stream stream)
    {
        if (bag == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("bag");

        if (stream == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("stream");

        BinaryWriter writer = new BinaryWriter(stream);
        writer.Write(bag.Count);
        foreach (Point3DCollection coll in bag)
        {
            writer.Write(coll.Count);
            foreach (Point3D point in coll)
            {
                writer.Write(point.X);
                writer.Write(point.Y);
                writer.Write(point.Z);
            }
        }
        writer.Flush();
    }

    public static void BinaryDeserialize(this ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> bag, Stream stream)
    {
        if (bag == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("bag");

        if (stream == null)
            throw new ArgumentNullException("stream");

        BinaryReader reader = new BinaryReader(stream);
        int count = reader.ReadInt32();
        for (int i = 0; i < count; i++)
        {
            int pointCount = reader.ReadInt32();
            Point3DCollection coll = new Point3DCollection(pointCount);
            for (int j = 0; j < pointCount; j++)
            {
                coll.Add(new Point3D(reader.ReadDouble(), reader.ReadDouble(), reader.ReadDouble()));
            }
            bag.Add(coll);
        }
    }
}

And a little console app test program to play with:

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Random rand = new Random(Environment.TickCount);
        ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> bag = new ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection>();
        for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++)
        {
            Point3DCollection coll = new Point3DCollection();
            bag.Add(coll);

            for (int j = rand.Next(10); j < rand.Next(100); j++)
            {
                Point3D point = new Point3D(rand.NextDouble(), rand.NextDouble(), rand.NextDouble());
                coll.Add(point);
            }
        }

        using (FileStream stream = new FileStream("test.bin", FileMode.Create))
        {
            bag.StringSerialize(stream); // or Binary
        }

        ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection> newbag = new ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection>();
        using (FileStream stream = new FileStream("test.bin", FileMode.Open))
        {
            newbag.StringDeserialize(stream); // or Binary
            foreach (Point3DCollection coll in newbag)
            {
                foreach (Point3D point in coll)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(point);
                }
                Console.WriteLine();
            }
        }
    }
}

Problem

I have, in my code, a `ConcurrentBag<Point3DCollection>`. I'm trying to figure out how to serialize them. Of course I could iterate through or package it with a provider model class, but I wonder if it's already been done. The `Point3DCollection`s themselves are potentially quite large and could stand to be compressed to speed up reading and writing to and from the disk, but the response times I need for this are largely in the user interface scale. In other words, I prefer a binary formatting over a XAML-text formatting, for performance reasons. (There is a nice XAML-text serializer which is part of the Helix 3D CodeProject, but it's slower than I'd like.) Is this a use case where I'm left rolling out my own serializer, or is there something out there that's already packaged for this kind of data?

Original source