Preventing serialization of properties in VB.NET

There are two ways to prevent serialization of properties in VB.NET:

Use the NonSerializedAttribute attribute

The NonSerializedAttribute attribute is a custom attribute that can be applied to properties to prevent them from being serialized. To use the N onSerializedAttribute attribute, simply apply it to the property that you want to prevent from being serialized.

For example, the following code shows how to use the NonSerializedAttribute attribute to prevent the Password property from being serialized:

Public Class Person Private password As String <NonSerializedAttribute()> Public Property Password As String Get Return password End Get Set(value As String) password = value End Set End Property End Class

If you serialize a Person object using the XmlSerializer class, the Password property will not be serialized.

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Use a custom serialization implementation

If you need more control over how your objects are serialized, you can create your own custom serialization implementation. To do this, you must implement the ISerializable interface.

The ISerializable interface defines two methods: GetObjectData() and OnDeserialization(). The GetObjectData() method is used to serialize the object, and the OnDeserialization() method is used to deserialize the object.

In the GetObjectData() method, you can manually specify which properties of the object to serialize. To do this, you can use the SerializationInfo.AddValue() method. For example, the following code shows how to implement a custom serialization for the Person class:

This code will only serialize the Password property of the Person object.

Once you have implemented the ISerializable interface, you can serialize the object using the XmlSerializer class. To do this, simply pass the object to the XmlSerializer class's Serialize() method.

For example, the following code shows how to serialize a Person object using the XmlSerializer class:

Public Class Person Implements ISerializable Private password As String Public Sub New(info As SerializationInfo, context As StreamingContext) Implements ISerializable.GetObjectData password = info.GetString("Password") End Sub Public Sub GetObjectData(info As SerializationInfo, context As StreamingContext) Implements ISerializable.GetObjectData info.AddValue("Password", password) End Sub Public Property Password As String Get Return password End Get Set(value As String) password = value End Set End Property End Class Sub SerializePerson() ' Create a new Person object. Dim person As New Person() person.Password = "password123" ' Create a new XmlSerializer object. Dim serializer As New XmlSerializer(GetType(Person)) ' Create a new FileStream object. Dim fileStream As New FileStream("person.xml", FileMode.Create) ' Serialize the Person object to the XML file. serializer.Serialize(fileStream, person) ' Close the FileStream object. fileStream.Close() End Sub

This code will create a new XML file called person.xml that contains the serialized Person object.

Conclusion

You can prevent the serialization of properties by marking them with the NonSerialized attribute. This attribute excludes specific properties from the serialization process, ensuring that sensitive or non-essential data is not included when serializing an object. It is useful for maintaining data privacy, security, or optimizing serialization performance.

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