Support for Serializing a class with NativeHashMaps and Deserializing with PopulateObject

[kenofori]

Hi there,

Is there possibity of serializing a class which has NativeHashMap and NativeList to json?
And then Deserailize back to it using PopulateObject , which means already Allocated NativeHashMap and NativeList so no issue of memeory leak here.

If not, can you please add support for that?

Thanks

[applejag]

Hi @kenofori! Thanks for reporting this. I haven't really thought about supporting Unity.Collections types, but it's certainly something I'm willing to do.

As I don't want a hard dependency on Unity.Collection in this package, that would probably have to be its own package (ex: jillejr.newtonsoft.json-for-unity.collectionsconverters).

This package does sadly currently not support populating at all, but instead it just recreates all values. See: #20
Supporting populating for the native types is promising and should of course be supported!

I cannot give you a promise of when this functionality will be implemented. I'm finding new routines in my life right now and I'm trying to dedicate some time back onto these Newtonsoft.Json-for-Unity projects.

Workaround

You'd have to use DTO's when deserializing. I find it a good habit anyway as it often results in cleaner code where objects aren't reused everywhere.

For example:

struct MyData {
    public NativeList<int> myList;
}

class MyDataJson {
    public List<int> myList;
}

MyData MapToMyData(MyDataJson jsonObj, Allocator allocator) {
    var myData = new MyData {
        myList = new NativeList<int>(jsonObj.myList.Count, allocator)
    };
    myData.myList.AddRange(jsonObj.myList);
    return myData;
}

Creating mapper methods is tedious but often results in cleaner code in the end and easier to refactor/add new code.