Summary

JsonExSerializer is a serializer/deserializer framework for C# that uses JSON format for its storage format.
A small number of extensions are added to facilitate correct reconstruction of the object upon deserialization. It is mainly intended to serialize objects to and from a storage medium, but it fully supports being used in an AJAX/web environment as well. See the SetJsonStrictOptions on the extensions page for how to turn off the extensions if transmitting to a browser. See the Tutorial and Usage pages for examples on how to use it.

Why?

I wanted a framework that I could use to persist objects to disk. I also wanted something that was human readable and easy to edit. Binary serialization is not human readable, and I didn't want to use xml because I found it too verbose for this purpose. I examined a few other JSON packages, but found nothing that could recreate the object graph exactly as it was deserialized. Especially if normal OO techniques such as inheritance were used. None of the implementations could handle references as well, which was pretty important to me.

Features

• Easy to use: Serialize an object in about 2-3 lines of code.
• Deserialize objects exactly as you serialized them with [References] intact
• Supports classes, structs, Generics, properties and public fields
• Support for constructors with arguments
• Serialization can be controlled programmatically, with .NET attributes, or using app.config
• [TypeConversion Easy customization], just create a different object to serialize which could be a Dictionary, String, ArrayList or any other type that you choose
• Formatted output by default so its easy to read, or you can serialize it compactly if you choose
• Can be customized to use your own factories or dependency injection frameworks when constructing objects

Issues

Bug reports can be submitted to the issue log. Issues or questions about JsonExSerializer can be posted to the JsonExSerializer discussion group.

News

• 3.1.1.283 has just been released (Jan 24 2013). See ReleaseNotes for more details. Contains minor debugging enhancements.
• (Jan 24 2013) 4.0 release is in-process and will contain many new features to bring the codebase in-line with .NET 4.0 as well as other common frameworks. See the issue list for details.

See the wiki for more [Usage] and explanation of features.