Thanks a lot Trent, that will get me started.

Edhy Rijo

Well, it would just be a matter of creating your header in a string format, etc.  Then place that header at the beginning.  For example, I might have an enum that tells me the contents of the byte array in the first element.  In this case, a "1" would indicate a business object.  You could make this as long as you need since you would be in control of the header.  The second part of the header may indicate, in bytes, the length of the serialized BO.

So when you get the byte array on the server side (or whereever) you already know what to expect in the header.  So you can parse it out of the array (convert it back into a string or whatever you expect) and then you know what to do with the rest of the array.

Hi again,

Thanks, but could you provide a quick sample code on how to add this byte to the header?  sorry, but I am really lost here

Edhy Rijo

Hmmm....it is going to be a lot mroe difficult to add it at the end as you will not know the length of the serialized BO.  That is why a header would work much better as you would know what to expect that tells you what is further down the stream.

Yes, but can you give me a sample code of how to add the info to the byte array? in my case I will enter the code at the end of the array and the communication library will take care of removing it from the transferred stream.

Edhy Rijo

Sure.  If I were going to do this I would put it in the front of the byte array with any information that will tell me where the serialized BO starts, etc.  So the beginning of the byte array would be a "header" that contained whatever information that you needed.  This is why I mentioned that resetting the memory stream was not a safe thing to do as other people may be using the memory stream for other things.

Trent,

Another question about serialization, when we use this command:

Is there a way to add some extra data to the pszOutMemByte variable?  With my communication library, I need to add and End Of Line character to the byte stream and have not found a way to do this, so the communication event will trigger when all data have arrive, so the question is how do I add these character to this byte array pszOutMemByte?

Edhy Rijo

No.  This could cause all types of issues.  This is the responsibility of the developer.  The same issue would come up with a file.  Most of the time you are not trying to do all of this within the same segment of code, the difference here is that you wrote to it then turned right around and read from it...so in this instance you have to reset the pointer.

Trent, thanks a lot for testing this, the missing part was the code to reposition the stream back to the 0 position.

Since this my first time working with a MemoryStream, I wonder, should the BO.DeserializeBusinessObject(mem) method take care of repositioning the passed stream to the 0 position?

Edhy Rijo

Yup, it worked.  You have to reposition the stream back to the 0 position, but it works like it should.