Deserialization of a DataSet... deal with column name changes? how to migrate data from one column to another?
- by Brian Kennedy
So, we wanted to slightly generalize a couple columns in our typed dataset... basically dropped a foreign key constraint and then wanted to change a couple column names to better reflect their new state. All that is easy.
The problem is that our users may have serialized out the old version of the DataSet as XML. We want to be able to read those old XML files and deserialize them into the revised DataSet. It seems that would be a fairly common desire... but I haven't yet figured out the right thing to search the internet for.
One possible solution would seem to be some way to give a DataColumn an alias or alternate name such that when it reads the old column name, it knows that data can be read into the column with the new column name. I can find no support for any such thing.
Another approach would seem to be an "after deserialization" method of some sort... so, I would let it read in the old column values into a normal DataColumn with that name, and then in the "after deserialization" method I would just move the data from the obsolete column into the new column, and then delete the old columns. That would seem to generalize to many other situations... and having such events or hooks is pretty common in ADO.NET. But I have looked for such a hook and haven't yet found it.
If no "after deserialization" hook, it would seem I ought to be able to override ReadXml or ReadXmlSerializable methods to call the base and then do my "after" stuff to fix up old data into new. But it does not appear that is possible.
Soooo, I have to think backward compatibility with old serialized DataSets and simple data migration would be a well-solved problem... so, trying to reinvent that wheel seems silly. But so far, I haven't seemed to find any documentation on doing those things.
Suggestions? What is best practice for this?
