Serializable Flag on a Class

[MrFile]

My company has developed a backend component which needs to be carried
around in session state, therefore it must be marked [Serializable] at
the class level.

The problem I have with this is that now any class that this class uses
must also be marked as serializable. This is a huge pain since now we
have a dozen classes marked.

Can someone better explain why we have to chain mark the supporting
classes in the first place? Also, does marking all these classes have
some sort of negative impact?

My idea to get around this was to make one light-weight class (that had
no supporting classes) and then have some sort of factory populate it,
this would therefore only require us to mark it serializable and it
would be our traveling container.

Your feedback on this would be appreciated.

 

[Steve C. Orr [MVP, MCSD]]

Yes its a bit of a pain to do it that way if you have a large object
structure.
An alternative is to use the ISerializable interface.
Here's more info:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...ntimeserializationiserializableclasstopic.asp