How to serialize the complex type into xml in Entity Framework?

Question

I have two classes called customer and address,customer is an entity while address is a value object.The definition of the classes are below:

 public class Customer
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string FirstName { get; set; }
    public string LastName { get; set; }
    public Address ShippingAddress { get; set; }
    public Address BillingAddress { get; set; }
}
 [ComplexType]
public class Address
{
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string Street { get; set; }
    public string StateOrProvince { get; set; }
    public string Country { get; set; }
}

If I create a new customer and insert it into database using entity framework,the customer table has 11 columns,there are 8 columns for address property.How to config the entity framework so that the complex type "address" can be stored as a xml type(single column) in the customer table.

Answer 1

you may use https://servicestack.net/text . Although it does not serialize to XML, it's a good JSON serializer.