Deserializing mixed content

Hey,

I’m trying to convert some XDocument code to deserialize some mixed XML content to use ExtendedXmlSerializer to greatly simplify the code. I started with the plain old XmlSerializer, but quickly ran into issues where I had to serialize an attribute that could either be a decimal or hexadecimal string which was easily solved with a custom converter but now I’ve run into the next issue which I can’t quite figure out how to solve.

The relevant section of XML looks as follows:

<StringFormat>Example <Ref field="Foo" /> bit of mixed <Ref field="Bar" /> xml content <Ref field="Baz" />ms</StringFormat>

I’m trying to get this into some data structures along these lines:

    public class MessageStringRef
    {
        [XmlAttribute("field")]
        public string Reference { get; set; }
    }

    public class MessageStringFormat
    {
        [XmlText(typeof(string))]
        [XmlElement("Ref", typeof(MessageStringRef))]
        public List<object> Parts { get; set; }
    }

So far everything I’ve tried with attributes results in Unknown/invalid member encountered: 'field'. I have no idea if ExtendedXmlSerializer even supports mixed content, so I tried registering a custom serializer for the StringFormat element. However, if I try to access parameter.Content() inside the serializer all I get is the text up until the first XML element, in the case of the example that’s "Example " which makes it impossible to do any custom parsing myself. (In the worst case, if I could get the entire body of the <StringFormat> node I can just fall back to the old XDocument parsing)

[Goz3rr]

Currently the workaround is good enough for me and I just added a little extra processing in the serializer to deal with the whitespace, thanks for the suggestion and looking into a potential fix 👍

[Goz3rr]

I tried to make a small repro but can’t seem to trigger the same issue, I’ll get back to you on Monday when I can look at my code that doesn’t work