Quick Tip: How to prevent a property from XML serialization?

In most cases, we use XML files to serialize/de-serialize data from/to the app. To do this, we expose properties of known types and pass them to the serializer for the automatic serialization process. Sometimes, we don’t need to serialize all the properties and manually need to mark them from the serialization process.

In this small blog post, we are going to see the way, by which you can prevent a property from the XML serialization process. Continue reading to know more.

The “XmlIgnoreAttribute”, part of the “System.Xml.Serialization” namespace allows you to ask the application not to serialize the marked properties. If you are serializing your data to XML, this attribute will help you. Just put the said attribute on top of all the properties, which you don’t want to serialize. The rest of the things will automatically be handle.

To demonstrate, just refer to the below code snippet. Here the properties named TokenKey and TokenValue will not be serialized as we have marked them as XmlIgnore. The rest of the other properties will continue as-is.

Small post, but I hope this will benefit a bunch of developers who are looking for a way to prevent some properties of their data object from serialization. Do let us know if the information was helpful. Have a great day ahead.