can dictionnaries be used in editor extensions?

Unity Engine
1

hi,
i’ve come to a point where i need to switch from a list to dictionnary in a project, i spent a day doing the code conversion only to know at the end that dictionnaries does not save its values in editor mode, it gets wipped and not serialized whenever i play the game or make a change in code,
is there any sollution for this ?

2

There’s a few… google up for how to serialize a dictionary in Unity. If I recall it was a custom class that stored the keys as one list and the values as another, and then you accessed it as a Dictionary, but it serialized as a pair of lists? Not sure how viable it was to use, but it seemed relevant.

Here’s a startpoint: https://answers.unity.com/questions/460727/how-to-serialize-dictionary-with-unity-serializati.html

Not sure if that was the one I saw before however… I think it was based on how it breaks them into lists before and after serialization.

1 Like
3

Unity’s own documentation for ISerializationCallbackReceiver uses Dictionary as their example:

Though I would argue it’s not the cleanest since it leaves the lists public and open for modification.

Personally I like to encapsulate the data portion so they can’t be easily broken… something like this:

public class zTest02 : MonoBehaviour, ISerializationCallbackReceiver
{

    public Dictionary<string, int> MyDict = new Dictionary<string, int>();
   
    [SerializeField]
    [HideInInspector]
    private DictData[] _dictData;

    void ISerializationCallbackReceiver.OnAfterDeserialize()
    {
        MyDict.Clear();
        foreach(var v in _dictData)
        {
            MyDict.Add(v.Key, v.Value);
        }
    }

    void ISerializationCallbackReceiver.OnBeforeSerialize()
    {
        _dictData = new DictData[MyDict.Count];
        int i = 0;
        foreach(var pair in MyDict)
        {
            _dictData[i] = new DictData() { Key = pair.Key, Value = pair.Value };
            i++;
        }
    }

    [System.Serializable]
    private struct DictData
    {
        public string Key;
        public int Value;
    }

}

If you wanted the ability to modify the dict through the inspector… well then you’re going to get into a custom editor.

1 Like
4

@Kurt-Dekker @lordofduct thanks for your help,
i managed to get it to work , this saved my life thanx again

1 Like