Consider defaulting to another serializer than binary

[fredericDelaporte]

Binary serialization (BinaryFormatter) is made obsolete in .Net 5.

Some caches use it by default. They have to be made obsolete themselves for .Net 5, or changed for another serialization default when possible.

(Issue extracted from nhibernate/nhibernate-core#2603.)

[danspam]

Alternative serializers like Message Pack require you to annotate the properties of your objects to identify which properties to serialize. Which properties of your entities do you need to serialize at minimum for NHibernate cache to function correctly? Child collections / Many-to-one properties / etc?

[fredericDelaporte]

This is implementation specific. Some caches do not need serialization at all. Those needing it usually require serializing the complete state.

This state is not the entities or collections themselves, but their "dehydrated" versions, which means, simple arrays of atomic types. Some caches also adds some of their own state in the serialized data though.

[ghost]

Hi,
for .net6 there seems to be no workaround using the binary serializer and you have to switch (https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/dotnet/standard/serialization/binaryformatter-security-guide)
I'm having trouble using the JsonCacheSerializer and IDistributedCache and cannot find much documentation or advice. Currently using MemoryDistributedCache and also want to use RedisCache.
It fails for me for simple types like Tuple<object, object>, CacheKey, QueryKey - and I'm not even sure I should register these types as they are NHibernates internals? Even if I do it fails later when deserializing CacheKey - do I need to add my own contracts for NH types?
Is there any further sample code or documentation to check out other than the docs stating "use JsonCacheSerializer" and the tests in this project?
Thanks

[danspam]

We ended up using the JsonCacheSerializer with StackExchangeRedisCache when moving away from binary serializer. It seemed the only reasonable option. Our configuration is :

cfg.AddProperties(new Dictionary<string, string> {
    {
        RedisEnvironment.Serializer,
        typeof(global::NHibernate.Caches.Util.JsonSerializer.JsonCacheSerializer).AssemblyQualifiedName
    }
});

Only other thing that needed to be done is to ensure the Assemble and Disassemble methods for custom types are correctly implemented.

[fredericDelaporte]

No need, see #117. But 5.9 is not yet released.

[fredericDelaporte]

5.9.0 is now released.

[spasecookee]

Works beautifully without having to use my own ConfigureJsonCacheSerializer() code. Many thanks.