DataContractSerializer: preserve string member that happens to be raw xml?

I'm a little inexperienced with the DataContract paradigm, and I'm running into a deserial开发者_如何学编程ization problem. I have a field that's a string, but it contains xml and it's not being deserialized correctly. I have a feeling that it's because the DCS is treating it as input to the serializer and not as an opaque string object.

Is there some way to mark a DataMember in code to say "This thing is a string, don't treat its contents as xml" similar to XmlIgnore?

Thanks!

Well, the equivalent to [XmlIgnore] is just not putting a [DataMember] on your property/field - if you're decorating everything with [DataMember] otherwise.

But I don't see how you could tell the DataContractSerializer to treat the property as an opaque string and nothing else.

You could try to have a separate property which adds <![CDATA[ before and ]]> after your content string, and serialize that property instead of your raw XML property (by decorating that new property with the [DataMember] attribute).

Something like this:

 public string XmlContent { get; set; }

 [DataMember]
 public string XmlContentSafe 
 { 
    get { return "<![CDATA[" + XmlContent + "]]>"; }
 }

Maybe that way you can trick the DCS ? (never tried it myself - just guessing....)

Turns out the easiest way to do this was just to cast the xml field coming from sql server to a varchar(max) when retrieving it from the database.

 CAST(CONVERT(XML,[RawXml],0) AS VARCHAR(MAX)) AS RawXml

In this case, the serializer seems to be ignoring it as desired. Thanks for the help though!

There is an easy way to do, just declare the property with raw XML as XmlElement

[DataMember]
public XmlElement RawXML { private get; set; }