Xml Serialization vs. “True” and “False”

Question

I\'m having an issue with deserializing an XML file with boolean values. The source XML files I\'m deserializing were created from a VB6 app, where all boolean values are c

Answer 1

Here is a much cleaner solution I came up with based on some other questions I found. It is much cleaner because then you don't need to anything in your code except declare the type as SafeBool, like this:

public class MyXMLClass
{
    public SafeBool Bool { get; set; }
    public SafeBool? OptionalBool { get; set; }
}

you can even make them optional and it all just works. This SafeBool struct will handle any case variants of true/false, yes/no or y/n. It will always serialize as true/false, however I have other structs similar to this I use to serialize specifically as y/n or yes/no when the schema requires that (ie: BoolYN, BoolYesNo structs).

using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Schema;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace AMain.CommonScaffold
{
    public struct SafeBool : IXmlSerializable
    {
        private bool _value;

        /// 

        /// Allow implicit cast to a real bool
        /// 
        /// Value to cast to bool
        public static implicit operator bool(
            SafeBool yn)
        {
            return yn._value;
        }

        /// 

        /// Allow implicit cast from a real bool
        /// 
        /// Value to cash to y/n
        public static implicit operator SafeBool(
            bool b)
        {
            return new SafeBool { _value = b };
        }

        /// 

        /// This is not used
        /// 
        public XmlSchema GetSchema()
        {
            return null;
        }

        /// 

        /// Reads a value from XML
        /// 
        /// XML reader to read
        public void ReadXml(
            XmlReader reader)
        {
            var s = reader.ReadElementContentAsString().ToLowerInvariant();
            _value = s == "true" || s == "yes" || s == "y";
        }

        /// 

        /// Writes the value to XML
        /// 
        /// XML writer to write to
        public void WriteXml(
            XmlWriter writer)
        {
            writer.WriteString(_value ? "true" : "false");
        }
    }
}