Serializing members using ToString / Parse

Sometimes types (classes or structs) don’t implement a proper serialization mechanism. If they support proper ToString(IFormatProvider) and Parse(string, IFormatProvider) methods, there is no need to create a custom SerializerModifier to serialize these types. To let the serializers take care of this automatically, at least one of the following options must be true:

  1. The member is decorated using the SerializeUsingParseAndToString attribute
  2. The container class has a SerializerModifier that returns true in the ShouldSerializeMemberUsingParse method

Note that decorating a member that does not implement proper ToString(IFormatProvider) and Parse(string, IFormatProvider) methods is useless, the serialization engine will ignore these types

For example, the class below is an excellent usage example of when to use this technique:

    [Serializable, StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential, Pack = 1)]
    public struct Vector
    {
        public double X;
        public double Y;
        public double Z;

        public Vector(double x, double y, double z)
        {
            X = x;
            Y = y;
            Z = z;
        }

        public string ToString(IFormatProvider formatProvider)
        {
            return $"{X.ToString(formatProvider)} {Y.ToString(formatProvider)} {Z.ToString(formatProvider)}";
        }

        public static Vector Parse(string value, IFormatProvider formatProvider)
        {
            var splitted = value.Split(new[] { " " }, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
            var x = double.Parse(splitted[0], formatProvider);
            var y = double.Parse(splitted[1], formatProvider);
            var z = double.Parse(splitted[2], formatProvider);

            var vector = new Vector(x, y, z);
            return vector;
        }
    }

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