Deserialize to self

Question

Ok, I\'m probably just having an epic fail here, but my mind wants to say this should work.

Assume DataProtect.DecryptData takes an encrypted string as input and a d

Answer 1

You can not assign anything to "this". Change ArriveDetails to a static that return the deserialised object.

class ArrivedDetails
{
    static ArrivedDetails Create(string encrypted)
    { return DataProtect.deserializeXML(...) }
}

Answer 2

No, this is not possible using a constructor, you can't reassign this.

Use a static method instead:

public static ArrivedDetails CreateFromString(string encrypted)
{
    return DataProtect.deserializeXML(DataProtect.DecryptData(encrypted));
}

Call it:

ArrivedDetails details = ArrivedDetails.CreateFromString(encrypted);

Answer 3

What you want is a static factory method that creates the object you require.

class ArrivedDetails
{
///...

    public static ArrivedDetails CreateFromEncryptedKey(string encrypted)
    {
        return DataProtect.deserializeXML(DataProtect.DecryptData(encrypted));
    }
///...

The reason your initial approach didn't work is because this is a private read-only instance field that returns the object from which it is called. You can't write to this.

Answer 4

You can archive this with reflection as follows.

var tmp = DataProtect.deserializeXML(DataProtect.DecryptData(encrypted));
foreach (var property in GetType().GetProperties())
    if (property.GetCustomAttributes(typeof (XmlIgnoreAttribute), false).GetLength(0) == 0)
        property.SetValue(this, property.GetValue(tmp, null), null);

This assigns the deserialized object to a temporal variable, and copy the value in each public property to this with reflection. This snippet avoids to copy properties with the XmlIgnore attribute.