Serialize a base class?

[David Lozzi]

Howdy,

A little background, using asp.net 2.0, i'm using a wizard object to create
a email interface for a user to email out their clientele, about 200 or so,
depending on the selection. The first step in the wizard is the email
selection, so it lists all the email accounts and distribution lists the
system has for the user, the user can select lists and/or individuals. I
then read through it all and throw it into an arraylist as a mailaddress
object. The next step in the wizard gives options of whether or not its
displays the selected recipients (including the ones in the lists), format
HTML vs Plain text, BCC the sender, etc. So I loop through all of the
selected emails in my arraylist to display which recipients the user is
emailing to. Here lies my issue.

I need the previously loaded arraylist of selected email addresses to still
be available. The only way i know how to do that is either throw it into a
session variable or the viewstate, both of which requires the class to be
serializable, which MailAddress isn't. I looked into Inheriting and trying
that but I got nowhere fast with that:

<Serializable()> Public Class MailAddress1
Inherits MailAddress

Public Sub New(ByVal email As String, ByVal display As String)
MyBase.New(email, display)
End Sub
End Class

I tried overriding the New sub but it wouldn't let me. So I instead moved
the collecting of email addresses to when the user presses Send. And i do a
lighter collection of the email addresses to a string for displaying their
selected recipients.

SO

I would like to only collect the email addresses once and use the same
arraylist multiple times, on multiple postbacks. Is this possible? I thought
about creating a new class to hold the email address, then transfer them
from my class to the mailaddress class when going to send, but that didnt
make much sens to me to do.

Thanks!!!

 

[sloan]

I think you're stuck with

Create your own Class.
I would write one that had the constructor value needs for the MailAddress
class.

MailAddress (String) Initializes a new instance of the MailAddress
class using the specified address.
MailAddress (String, String) Initializes a new instance of the
MailAddress class using the specified address and display name.
MailAddress (String, String, Encoding)


I'd probably pick the second one.

(Serializable _)
public class MyEMailAddressInfo
property EmailAddress as string
property DisplayName as string

public static (shared in vb.net) GetMailAddress ( e as
MyEMailAddressInfo ) as MailAddress

and then create a collection of these

public class MyEmailAddressInfoCollection : List (Of MyEMailAddressInfo )
( use the inherit keyword instead of the c# ":" of course).

And I'd keep a copy of this object in the Session.

That's what I would do, look for other ideas from others.


Even if that class was serializable, you probably want to keep a "lite"
version of the values (aka the custom collection above) for either Session
or ViewState keeping, because of memory issues.
Keeping around alot of MailAddress objects, just because you need a bunch of
(e-mail address removed) values seems non-frugal with the resources


Use the
public static (shared in vb.net) GetMailAddress ( e as MyEMailAddressInfo )
to delay getting those MailAddress objects you need when you actually need
them.