Today's Dreaded Exception: Data at the root level is invalid.
Found a problem recently when serializing a custom object. Here's what I was working with. Warning: this is the bathroom wall of code version. Do not copy/paste this into production.
public static XmlDocument SerializeToXmlDoc(Object obj)
{
try
{
XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
string xmlString = SerializeIt(obj);
xmlDoc.LoadXml(xmlString);
return xmlDoc;
}
catch (Exception e) { return null; }
}
public static string SerializeIt(Object obj)
{
try
{
MemoryStream memoryStream = new MemoryStream();
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());
XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream, Encoding.UTF8);
xs.Serialize(xmlTextWriter, obj);
memoryStream = (MemoryStream)xmlTextWriter.BaseStream;
string xmlString = UTF8ByteArrayToString(memoryStream.ToArray());
return xmlString;
}
catch (Exception e) { return null; }
}
private static string UTF8ByteArrayToString(byte[] characters)
{
UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
String constructedString = encoding.GetString(characters);
return (constructedString);
}
The problem that was that as I passed one of my custom objects to it, I'd get this exception:
Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.
Fine, root level… got it. Let's take a peek at what's actually trying to be loaded.
Wait, What The…?
Here's the kicker: there was a funny null/something character at the beginning of the string, and therefore, my XmlDoc couldn't successfully execute the LoadXml method. Confessional: I scraped this method from the interwebs and its bathroom wall of code. I tweaked it to suit my needs. I figured it was ready for ANY kind of POCO object. Guess not. I have hit the 10% case where it didn't work well. Well, let's fire up the Text Visualizer and figure out why that string isn't loading into an XmlDocument properly.
Hmm. That's funny. What is that?! Turning to the Immediate Window didn't give any real answers as to the value of that unknown/bad character.
Hmm. Looks blank. I then copied that value right from the Immediate Window, pasted into Notepad, it comes out as a question mark. Nice! Here's the direct paste:
?xmlString.Substring(0,1)
"?"
Solved!
You could go down all kinds of kludgey roads and try to replace the first character if it's not angle bracket "<", or try and trim null chars, etc.
Turns out that a StringWriter will do the job well in this case. No more null character leading to a failed load of the string.
(via the bathroom wall of code at http://asp.net2.aspfaq.com/xml-serialization/simple-serialization.html)
public static string SerializeIt(Object obj)
{
try
{
XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());
StringWriter sw = new StringWriter();
serializer.Serialize(sw, obj);
sw.Close();
// get the Xml as a string
string xmlString = sw.GetStringBuilder().ToString();
return xmlString;
}
catch (Exception e) { return null; }
}
The MemoryStream algorithm worked well for some of my POCO objects, but not for another.