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Dictionary support for JsonUtility

Discussion in '5.3 Beta' started by LostSignal, Oct 17, 2015.

  1. LostSignal

    LostSignal

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    I want to stop using the JsonDotNet library in favor of the new JsonUtility, but it seems to be missing the very important feature of serializing the generic Dictionary class. Any change that will one day be supported?
     
    LostSignal, Oct 17, 2015
    #1
    rakkarage likes this.

  2. superpig

    superpig

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    Probably not any time soon, as we have to support it in the serialiser itself (i.e. In the Inspector, etc) before we can support it in JsonUtility. It'd also be difficult to make it fast.
     
    superpig, Oct 17, 2015
    #2

  3. superpig

    superpig

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    Note that JsonUtility does support the ISerializationCallbackReceiver interface, though; if you want to pack stuff from/to a dictionary before/after serialisation, you can use it to do that.
     
    superpig, Oct 17, 2015
    #3

  4. LostSignal

    LostSignal

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    Oh cool, I didn't realize that was supported. Thanks!
     
    LostSignal, Oct 17, 2015
    #4

  5. mb133

    mb133

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    I think I saw it somewhere else in these forums, but I'd be keen on a [SerializeAs("fieldNameInJson")] type attribute if it's not already in the works. We're more interested in how to read json data that we're given (service responses) than using it for storing our own data. Dictionaries would be ideal but the attribute might be enough for us :)
     
    mb133, Oct 18, 2015
    #5

  6. superpig

    superpig

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    Yep, the ability to provide multiple source names and an alternative target name are high on my to-do list, as well as stuff like letting you make enums serialise as strings rather than numbers.
     
    superpig, Oct 18, 2015
    #6
    rakkarage, jay-jin and Novack like this.

  7. mb133

    mb133

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    Awesome! Looking forward to seeing how this utility develops :)
     
    mb133, Oct 18, 2015
    #7

  8. superpig

    superpig

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    (For the curious: both features require that we can read attribute values from fields from C++. Currently, we can find out whether you have an attribute applied to a field from C++, but we can't see what the values on it are without actually constructing the attribute object on the C# side, and that would generate a ton of garbage and be very slow. So, first step is actually for us to modify Mono and IL2CPP to let us retrieve the parameters you passed to the attribute directly from the assembly metadata).
     
    superpig, Oct 18, 2015
    #8
    rakkarage, jay-jin, Novack and 1 other person like this.