Deserialization State Exception When Reference Entity Has Attribute-based Property

Hey folks,

About the issue

I encountered a weird behavior with Extended XML serializer 3.6.0 yesterday: we have a pretty complex model where some entities reference each other, thus we enabled references in the ConfigurationContainer. More precisely, our model consists of a map that is the container object for several other entities like nodes, obstacles, storage rows, etc. Consequently, the map has a collection for each entity type.

Everything worked fine (for several months) until we added a new property to one of our entities. After that, ExtendedXmlSerializer no longer set the aforementioned collection properties while deserializing a map.

Minimal, complete, verifiable example

I have created a MCVE that you can find in this GitHub repo: https://github.com/Synnotech-AG/VweXmlSetCollectionsError

The repo contains the source code of ExtendedXmlSerializer as well as two additional projects: one of them is a simplified version of our core model, the other one is a test project with six tests. The repo contains two branches: if you checkout the working-mcve branch and run the tests, you will see that everything works as expected:

If you then switch to the failing-mcve branch, you will see that we added a simple property to the StorageLocation class:

However if we run the tests again, some of the serialization tests fail:

The one you should focus on is called SerializeSmallMap - it has the least instances involved.

What I’ve tried so far

I have only put in a few hours, but this is what I gathered so far:

• The call to Deserialize does not throw, it simply does not set the collection properties on the Map object.
• It doesn’t matter if you change the name of the new property
• If the property is nullable and has null assigned to it, then deserialization works. However, if it is any other string value, deserialization fails in the same way as described above.
• I tried to debug the tests to figure out what goes wrong but I couldn’t really find the source of the issue. As far as I understand the ExtendedXmlSerializer source, you dynamically generate code at runtime and call these via delegates, but I still need to figure out where the code is generated that sets the collections for the map.
• I’m pretty sure that this issue is machine-independent. We encounter the same behavior on two dev machines as well as on our build server.

As always, thank you so much for your help in advance. I think this is a great project! I hope we can resolve this issue soon.

[Mike-E-angelo]

FWIW we are currently blocked on a release due to NextRelease issues. They are looking into it and should have something here in the next day, I am hoping. 🤞 I will update here accordingly.

[Mike-E-angelo]

Oh wow, thank you for that! I did consider doing the sponsorship thing at one point but ultimately decided against it. I might though if others do ask for it, although my feeling is that I do not want to encourage it as it really is no longer a primary focus in my life (sad to say in this regard but happy in another… more on that below).

I obviously do not do this for the money but more of a call to a neurotic sense of duty, haha. I started out this version of the project in some ways to prove myself as a developer. Now I have all this code I have to support. Amazingly, I somehow manage to make it work, but it’s a kind, enduring reminder to be careful of what I wish for in life. 😉

BTW, if you do want to support me, please sign up for the project that I am actively working on now:

https://starbeam.one

I am hoping to have something to share later on this year (August-ish, I am hoping 🤞).

Don’t forget to use a burner address, I use this nifty service extensively, myself: https://burnermail.io/

Thanks again for the kind thoughts! It made my day.

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