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General serialization for Dart objects.

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Save and restore objects flexibly.

This can serialize and de-serialize objects to multiple different formats. It is most useful if you have Dart on both ends, rather than needing to communicate with an external system. It can handle cycles, inheritance, getters and setters, private or final fields set via constructors, objects serialized in different ways at different times, and other complex options. It can handle serializing acyclic objects with only public fields to a simple JSON format, but might be more heavyweight than is necessary if that's the only requirement.

This has no privileged access to object representations, so objects are accessed and created according to their public APIs. As a result, serializations from older versions where the internal representation has changed can still be read as long as the public API is still available.

The way an object's state is read and written is defined by SerializationRules. These can be implemented in various ways. The easiest to use is using mirrors to find the members. Rules can also be hand-written or, for relatively simple classes, generated using a transformer.

Usage

Import either

import "package:serialization/serialization.dart"

or

import "package:serialization/serialization_mirrors.dart"

depending on whether or not you want the mirrored rules. These are more convenient, but cause increased code size in dartj2s.

To use the transformer, include something in your pubspec like

 transformers:
   - serialization :
     $include: ["lib/stuff.dart", "lib/more_stuff.dart"]

and set up the generated rules in a Serialization instance, on which you can then call write().

import 'package:my_package/stuff_serialization_rules.dart' as foo;
 ...
 var serialization = new Serialization();
 foo.rules.values.forEach(serialization.addRule);
 ...
 sendToClient(serialization.write(somePerson));

and on the client, do something like

 p = readFromServer(personId).then((data) => serialization.read(data));

If you're using the mirrored rules, then you can just tell the serialization which classes you're interested in.

  var serialization = new Serialization()
    ..addRuleFor(Address);
  serialization.write(address);

Requests and bugs

Please file feature requests and bugs via the GitHub Issue Tracker. This is licensed under the same license as Dart

Disclaimer

This is not an official Google project.