Serializable Dictionary in Unity Editor?

Questions & Answers
1

I’ve created an AudioManager Monobehavior for handling all audio in my 2D platformer. As part of this behavior, it holds a public Dictionary of type Dictionary. I wanted to set these values in the editor so that I could have a dictionary of sound clips with names, but the Dictionary type apparently isn’t editable in the Editor.

I found a class online that seems to do this - Unity3D: Class that behaves like a Dictionary<K, V>, but can still be serialized and edited by the Unity Editor. · GitHub.

Is there a better way to do this or am I limited to this class? I don’t mind using this, but I don’t know if there are any performance issues. I’d like to see if there’s a different way to proceed before I commit to this path. Thank you!

TL:DR - is there a class that works like a Dictionary, but is serializable in Unity’s editor window?

2

I ended up creating a class with an array of Serializable classes, instead of the Dictionary. However, when the game starts, I parse the array and add all contents to a Dictionary; basically, I’m using an array just to get it to display in the Editor (while in-game, I have the one-to-one lookup).

Like this:

public void OnEnable () {		
	// Make sure that the array is populated. If not, create a new instance.
	if (myEntries == null) { myEntries = new AudioEntry[0]; }
	// Also, here, we need to actually populate our dictionary item.
	lookupTable = new Dictionary<string, AudioClip>();
	foreach (AudioEntry entry in myEntries) {
		lookupTable.Add(entry.Name, entry.value);
	}
}
3

If you agree on third party assets, a serializable dictionary is part of ‘Custom Inspector’ (Custom Inspector | Utilities Tools | Unity Asset Store)
Here is a preview of the inspector:
204160-dictionarypreview.png