[Mono-devel-list] Serializing widgets with C#

[Rafael Ferreira]

Alfredo Jose Muela Romero wrote:

>El Sun, 31 Jul 2005 17:48:21 -0700
>Rafael Ferreira <lists at ophion.org> escribió:
>
>  
>
>>Crazy question but can you explain to me why would you want to do
>>that? 
>>    
>>
>
>	Sure.
>
>	The point is that I'm developing a program in which the GUI is
>generated dinamically (i.e. widgets come and go with the user
>interaction) so one of my business classes contains an array of
>Gtk.Widgets (the ones which are added to the interface). So, somehow, I
>need to keep this info for the next restarting of the program (in order
>to keep the interface as the user wanted before stopping the program).
>At this point the choices were:
>
>	1) Back-up the object at a OODB
>	2) Back-up the data at tables in a RDB
>	3) Make a config file where I put the needed info to reconstruct the
>objects (with the widgets) at starting time
>	4) Serialize the objects before stopping the program and deserialize
>them at starting.
>
>	And, well, you know my choice.
>
>	Any suggestions and/or advices will be welcomed.
>
>
>			Alfredo.
> 
>  
>
>>- raf
>>
>>On Sun, 2005-07-31 at 19:46 +0200, Alfredo Jose Muela Romero wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>	Hi everybody,
>>>
>>>	I'm new to this list, I have look up the answer to my question
>>>	trough
>>>the list's files but I haven't found it so I'll make it: how can I
>>>make it to serialize an object which contains an array of
>>>Gtk.Widgets since for serializing I need to mark the classes with
>>>[Serializable]? In other words, how can I serialize an object with
>>>3rd party objects whithin?
>>>
>>>	Thanks in advance,
>>>
>>>
>>>				Alfredo.
>>>_______________________________________________
>>>Mono-devel-list mailing list
>>>Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>>>http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>>>      
>>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Mono-devel-list mailing list
>>Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>>http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>>    
>>
>_______________________________________________
>Mono-devel-list mailing list
>Mono-devel-list at lists.ximian.com
>http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-devel-list
>  
>
What you're trying to accomplish is impossible. first because gtk 
widgets are not serializable and secondly, it just sounds like a bad 
idea all together :-). In order for you to serialize an array of 
anything the entire object graph needs to be serializable, so if you 
wrap a gtk widget in a class that is ISerializable, it will still fail 
since the widget isn't.

 I suggest you look into Monodevelop's settings code to get a sense of 
how MD is persisting the user UI preferences and reconfiguring it at 
start up.


my 2 cents,

- raf