Serializing a tree object in c#

Question

I got a simple tree structure which contains the following

public class MyTree {
 public MyTree Parent { get; set;}
 public List<MyTree> Children {get; set;}
[...]
}

Currently the class is much more complex, but this is the important part to my problem I think. That code is quite old and I cannot just change the complete structure, because it is used in many areas in a project I have to maintain.

My main problem is that I cannot serialize that object. (I start serializing from root object) I get the following message:

A circular reference was detected while serializing an object of type MyTree

It seems quite clear why this happens because I have the children AND parent connected.

But how can I solve that problem? Can I disable serialization of the parent property for example?

Answer 1

Mark parent as not serialize item ( XmlIgnore , SoapIgnore or NonSerialized ). Check about different there .

In your case you add parent to xml, after this trying to add children. Each child has link to parent and serializer tries to serialize parent again and so on..