Serialization attributes

You can use custom attributes to control member serialization.

Specifying Serializable Members

You have three options to specify a type is serializable with MessagePack serializers. The runtime trying followling order.

• If the target type has any members which are marked with MessagePackMemberAttribute, then only those members will be serialized in opt-in manner.
• If the target type is marked with DataContractAttribute, then members with DataMemberAttribute will only be serialized in opt-in manner.
• Else, members which are NOT marked with NonSerializedAttribute will be serialized in opt-out manner.

Note that using MessagePackMemberAttribute is prefered. Remainings exist just for interoperability for existent frameworks.

MessagePackMemberAttribute

This attribute specifies following MessagePack dedicated metadata.

ID

Specifies numeric identifier of the member. IDs should be continuous and shall be started with 0. Missing IDs are considered that those members are omitted in the runtime (CTS type) representation. That is, the nil will be emittes in serialization, the values at those IDs will be skipped in deserialization.

Nil Implication

There are three options for what the nil implies.

• MemberDefault means that the nil will be interpreted as the member is omitted, so unpacker does not ANY action for corresponds member. This option will not affect serialization. This value corresponds to optional in the IDL.
• Null means that the nil will be interpreted as null. As you see, the type must be reference type or Nullable<T> value type. This value corresponds to nullable required in the IDL.
• Prohibitmeans that serialized value must not be nil even if the member type is reference type. This value corresponds to required in the IDL. This option will affect both of serialization and deserialization process. By the way, when the nil is emitting or deserializing, SerializationException will be thrown.

Note: Respecting to the IDL design, members are required by default.

DataContract Interoperability

As mentioned above, you can use DataContractAttribute to specify MessagePack serialization. It may be useful when you expose entities as Web Services on the same time, for example.

Without Any Attributes

If any members of the type are not marked with MessagePackMemberAttribute and the type itself is not qualifed with DataContractAttribute, all read/write PUBLIC members (that is, fields which are not readonly and properties which have both of getter and setter) are serialized. This is useful for casual cases, but you should explicitly annotate members for many production scenarios.

NonSerialized

You can exclude members from serialization via NonSerializedAttribute.

Polymorphism

For [MessagePackKnownType], [MessagePackKnownCollectionItemType], [MessagePackKnownDictionaryKeyType], [MessagePackKnownTupleItemType], [MessagePackRuntimeType], [MessagePackRuntimeCollectionItemType], [MessagePackRuntimeDictionaryKeyType], and [MessagePackRuntimeTupleItemType] see [Polymorphism].