Serializing basic objects

Questions & Answers
1

I'm having some trouble with serializing basic objects ... can anyone help?? I'm building my own Unity server in c# ... I created a basic messaging clas like this ... 

[Serializable]
public class BaseMessage
{
    public int size;
    [NonSerialized]
    public Socket Socket;
    [NonSerialized]
    public List<byte> TransmissionBuffer = new List<byte>();

    //public byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];

    //Usually you shouldn't but these 2 methods in your class because they don't operate specifically on this object
    //and we would get allot of duplicate code if we would put those 2 methods in each class we would like to
    //be able to send but to not wind up having to write a couple of utility classes (where these should reside)
    // I let them reside here for now.
    public byte[] SerializeMe()
    {
        BinaryFormatter bin = new BinaryFormatter();
        MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
        bin.Serialize(mem, this);
        return mem.GetBuffer();
    }

    public BaseMessage DeSerializeMe()
    {
        byte[] dataBuffer = TransmissionBuffer.ToArray();
        BinaryFormatter bin = new BinaryFormatter();
        MemoryStream mem = new MemoryStream();
        mem.Write(dataBuffer, 0, dataBuffer.Length);
        mem.Seek(0, 0);

        return (BaseMessage)bin.Deserialize(mem);
    }
}

[Serializable]
public class Hello : BaseMessage
{
    public IPEndPoint IP { get; set; }
    public Hello()
    {
    }
}

this messaging class is compiled into a .dll and avaliable on both sides.

In my unity editor I created a basic connection class that works fine ... I make the connection to the server and send of the hello msg like this ... 

Hello hello = new Hello();
        hello.IP = serverEndPoint;
        byte[] msg = hello.SerializeMe();
        Debug.Log(hello.IP);
        clientStream.Write(msg, 0, msg.Length);
        clientStream.Flush();

The problem is on the server side the hello.IP is null !!! this seems weird to me because the client works fine as a c# project but not with unity ... what am I missing here??

2

From the unity scripting reference

Unity will serialize all your script components, reload the new assemblies, and recreate your script components from the serialized verions. This serialization does not happen with .NET's serialization functionality, but with an internal Unity one.

The serialization system used can do the following:

  • CAN serialize public nonstatic fields (of serializable types)
  • CAN serialize nonpublic nonstatic fields marked with the [SerializeField] attribute.
  • CANNOT serialize static fields.
  • CANNOT serialize properties.

You can't serialize properties. If you want to use it a property I believe you have to do it like this.

[SerializeField]
private IPEndPoint _IP;

public IPEndPoint IP
{
    get { return _IP; }
    set { _IP = value; }
}