Date formatting when serializing an object in C # (2.0)

Question

I am xml serializing an object with a lot of properties, and I have two properties with DateTime types. I would like to format dates for serialized output. I really don't want to implement the IXmlSerializable interface and overwrite serialization for each property. Is there any other way to achieve this?

(I am using C #, .NET 2)

Thank.

Answer 1

To serialize XML, you need to implement IXmlSerializable, not ISerializable.

However, you can get around this with the helper property and mark the properties with an DateTimeattribute XmlIgnore.

public class Foo
{
    [XmlIgnore]
    public DateTime Bar { get; set; }

    public string BarFormatted
    {
        get { return this.Bar.ToString("dd-MM-yyyy"); }
        set { this.Bar = DateTime.ParseExact(value, "dd-MM-yyyy", null); }
    }
}

Answer 2

/- DateTime, ToString.

public struct CustomDateTime
{
    private readonly DateTime _date;

    public CustomDateTime(DateTime date)
    {
        _date = date;
    }

    public override string ToString()
    {
        return _date.ToString("custom format");
    }
}