Simple object serialization

[wweems@gmail.com]

I've got a simple javascript object that represents a small portion of
a page.

I'd like to "serialize" these objects into something I can then parse
up with asp.net and c# on the other end.

I've got the remote scripting portion all setup and it works great.

My question is... if I have an object that looks like the following

Card->Name
->Address
->Phone
->Notes

How can I convert that to a simple string to send to a server. I could
do it manually eg, write a Card.Serialize( ) method that simply wraps it
in generic XML, but is there anyway I can do it automatically.. . that
works in IE and FF?


Thanks very much in advance!
Weston

[Alexis Nikichine]

Re: Simple object serialization

wweems@gmail.co m wrote:
[color=blue]
> My question is... if I have an object that looks like the following
>
> Card->Name
> ->Address
> ->Phone
> ->Notes
>
> How can I convert that to a simple string to send to a server. I could
> do it manually eg, write a Card.Serialize( ) method that simply wraps it
> in generic XML, but is there anyway I can do it automatically.. . that
> works in IE and FF?[/color]

If XML were not a strong requirement, I would suggest you to take a look
at Douglas Crockford's http://www.json.org, and use its "stringify"
(http://www.crockford.com/JSON/js.html )function as-is.

Otherwise, I would take the time to understand it, and turn it into a
genric, say 'xmlify', function, which should not be that hard. The
resulting XML strings would then conform to a DTD defined mainly by the
name of your object fields, so it will be up to the server side to adapt
itself to understand the resulting XML.

Related to your problem are the existences of

* some nicely fleshed XML parsers fully written in javascript, such as

http://xmljs.sourceforge.net

* the XMLHttp object: http://jibbering.com/2002/4/httprequest.html
* the possibility to embed XML "data island" in your document.

Hope this helps,


Alexis