Serializing an Arraylist of an ArrayList

I have a DatagridView in my ap开发者_如何学Goplication. I want to serialize the gridview columns into a XML-file. Serializing just the columns name is easy but I want to serialize the columns index too.

Serializing the columns would I do like this:

ArrayList array = new ArrayList();
foreach(DataGridViewColumn column in datagridView1.Columns)
{
    array.Add(column.Name)
}

using (FileStream file = new FileStream("test.xml", FileMode.Create))
{
     SoapFormatter formatter = new SoapFormatter();
     formatter.Serialize(file, array);
}

But I´m wondering how can I serialize the column index too?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Two things to note up front:

• Since you're not creating a soap message, I'd recommend BinarySerializer or XmlSerializer for ad-hoc serialization.
• You should definitely prefer a strongly-typed List<string> over an untyped ArrayList.

With that said, I'd recommend against serializing altogether -- its too heavyweight for your purposes, and its not a very good approach to long-term storage or transfer of objects (e.g. let's say you serialize a class in v1.0 of your app, then deserialize it in v2.0, all sorts of weirdness can happen).

I'd recommend the following approach: sort your columns by index, then write them out line-by-line to your file. Your columns will be ordered correctly in your file:

using(FileStream file = new FileStream("test.xml", FileMode.Create))
{   
    var columnNames =
        dataGridView1.Columns
        .Cast<DataGridViewColumn>()
        .OrderBy(x => x.ColumnIndex)
        .Select(x => x.Name);

    foreach(string column in columnNames)
        file.WriteLine(column);
}

Create a public class ColumnInfo with Name and Index and you can store this to array list which can be searialized.

[Serializable]
public class ColumnInfo
{
    public string Name;
    public int Index;       
}

ArrayList array = new ArrayList();
foreach(DataGridViewColumn column in datagridView1.Columns)
{
    ColumnInfo ci = new ColumnInfo();
    ci.Name = column.Name;
    //ci.Index = column.Index; //decide how to get column index
    array.Add(ci);
}

using (FileStream file = new FileStream("test.xml", FileMode.Create))
{
     SoapFormatter formatter = new SoapFormatter();
     formatter.Serialize(file, array);
}

Update I personally use XmlFormater, I copied the source sample from question for example. Thank you abstishchev