Sending Dictionaries through Commands and RPCs

As of right now, it seems that sending dictionaries is not possible. Also Tuples are not supported by Mono.

I searched the forums and got a workaround, which consists of converting dict into string and sending that.

Are there any other good alternatives?

Cheers,
Frosty

 

My workaround (which sucks) is to utilize SyncLists with predefined keys for the indices. I too wish there was a "good" prescribed solution from Unity that would allow for easily syncing dicts. Would love to hear better solutions...

 

Serialize the dictionary to byte with BinaryFormatter and send it via rpc, the getter has to deserialize the byte stream back to dictionary. That would work.

 

Here's some code to do what @Kamil Says

Code (CSharp):

1. MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
2. BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
3. try
4. {
5.     formatter.Serialize(stream, objectToSerialize);
6. }
7. catch (SerializationException e)
8. {
9.     Debug.Log("Serialization Failed : " + e.Message);
10. }
11. byte[] objectAsBytes = stream.ToArray();
12. stream.Close();

Code (CSharp):

1. SomeObject objectThatWasDeserialized;
2. MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
3. stream.Write(objectAsBytes, 0, objectAsBytes.Length);
4. stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
5. BinaryFormatter formatter = new BinaryFormatter();
6. try
7. {
8.     objectThatWasDeserialized = (SomeObject)formatter.Deserialize(stream);
9. }
10. catch (SerializationException e)
11. {
12.     Debug.Log("Deserialization Failed : " + e.Message);
13. }
14. stream.Close();

 

@thegreatzebadiah It's a good idea, however I've now stumbled across another problem. I have a dict:
Dictionary<Vector3, string>. And unfortunately Vector3 is not serializable. Meaning I have to use a custom serialize class (did some research).

But I ended up sending string[] instead. Converted Vector3 to string and later converted back to string with a custom function. Feels like a bad hack. At least it works though.

 

This just sends the entirety of the object. I'd much prefer only sending partial updates upon mutation.

 

Code (CSharp):

1. public static class SerializedVector3View
2. {
3.     public static byte[] SerializeVector3(DangGamesVector3 vectorObject)
4.     {
5.         BinaryFormatter binaryF = new BinaryFormatter();
6.         using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
7.         {
8.             binaryF.Serialize(memoryStream,vectorObject);
9.  
10.             return memoryStream.ToArray();
11.         }
12.     }
13.  
14.     public static DangGamesVector3 DeserializeVector3(byte[] dataStream)
15.     {
16.         using (MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream())
17.         {
18.             BinaryFormatter binaryF = new BinaryFormatter();
19.  
20.             memoryStream.Write(dataStream, 0, dataStream.Length);
21.             memoryStream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
22.  
23.             return (DangGamesVector3)binaryF.Deserialize(memoryStream);
24.         }
25.     }
26. }

That should work just change it to dictionary

 

You would be better off using NetworkWriter to do the serialization, then SendWriter() or SendBytes.