dart_serializable

I never liked the way Dart developers used to serialize objects by creating a factory constructor, as this way doesn't provide a base class for serialization. Providing a base class is the OOP way of doing things, as it will be enough to send a Serializable object to the caching function or the HTTP send method as the request body, and the method will handle it.

In a language like C# this is not needed as any object can be serialized via reflection, which dart language abandoned in favor of tree-shaking.

Trying to use Generics to implement it failed as dart language doesn't support creating a new object of generic type new T(), solved by requiring a creator callback as a parameter

Example

class Model1 extends Serializable{

  String? stringField;
  int? intField;
  double? doubleField;
  bool? boolField;

  @override
  void fromMap(Map<String, dynamic> map) {
    stringField = map['stringField'];
    intField = map['intField'];
    doubleField = map['doubleField'];
    boolField = map['boolField'];
  }

  @override
  Map<String, dynamic> toMap() {
    final Map<String, dynamic> map = <String, dynamic>{};
    map['stringField'] = stringField;
    map['intField'] = intField;
    map['doubleField'] = doubleField;
    map['boolField'] = boolField;
    return map;
  }

}

void main() {
  var model = Model1()
    ..stringField='abc'
    ..intField=4
    ..doubleField=3.6
    ..boolField=true;

  var json = Serializable.serializeObject(model);
  print(json);

  var deserializedModel = Serializable.deserializeObject(json, ()=> Model1());
  print(deserializedModel);
}

The output would be

{"stringField":"abc","intField":4,"doubleField":3.6,"boolField":true}
{"stringField":"abc","intField":4,"doubleField":3.6,"boolField":true}

For lists

var jsonList = '[{"stringField":"abc","intField":4,"doubleField":3.6,"boolField":true}, {"stringField":"def","intField":5,"doubleField":3.8,"boolField":false}]';

  var list = Serializable.deserializeList(jsonList, ()=> Model1());
  print(list);

Class Generator

Any generator can be used, but you need to change the created methods to conform to the fromMap and toMap required by Serializable base, or use this utility which is a cmd app created in .Net

GitHub - muhammad369/JsonToDart

Libraries

dart_serializable