Welcome to the Lounge

public enum ItemType
{
    Image,
    Icon,
}
public class Item
{
    public ItemType Type { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }
}
public class Document
{
    public List<Item> Items = new List<Item>();
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var doc = new Document
        {
            Items =
            {
                new Item { Name = "foo", Type = ItemType.Icon, },
                new Item { Name = "bar", Type = ItemType.Icon, },
                new Item { Name = "snafu", Type = ItemType.Image, },
            },
        };

        // serialize to json, simple!
        var json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(doc, Formatting.Indented);
        Console.WriteLine(json);

        // serialize to XML, kinda mouthful
        var xmlS = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Document));
        var sb = new StringBuilder();
        xmlS.Serialize(new StringWriter(sb), doc);
        var xml = sb.ToString();
        Console.WriteLine(xml);
    }

{
  "Items": [
    {
      "Type": 1,
      "Name": "foo"
    },
    {
      "Type": 1,
      "Name": "bar"
    },
    {
      "Type": 0,
      "Name": "snafu"
    }
  ]
}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?>
<Document xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Items>
    <Item>
      <Type>Icon</Type>
      <Name>foo</Name>
    </Item>
    <Item>
      <Type>Icon</Type>
      <Name>bar</Name>
    </Item>
    <Item>
      <Type>Image</Type>
      <Name>snafu</Name>
    </Item>
  </Items>
</Document>

[{prop:"value"}]

{"1":"this", "2":"that"}

Super Lloyd wrote:

it would be brittle (what if people create an incorrect "properties.json file?)

• I already have a serializer where whole document can be saved / loaded in one method call (very much like JsonConvert) except it's much more compact than JSON... (i.e. smaller files), while still being versioning tolerant and strongly typed...

• save to zip archive is here to provide easy editing abilities so that (power-)user can, for example, rip image out or edit rectangle lists manually (although I am building an editor right now..), otherwise I could as well use my serializer!

Super Lloyd wrote:

the point of using a .zip archive (which will require a properties.json to add missing information) is to let (power-)users open the file and rip the images out. And also perhaps even edit the image maps (rectangle list) with a text file.

• people might think "this image is cool I would like to use it"
  I want to make that easy. if resource bag is zip archive user can just open it and get the images. on the other hand they could drag and drop from the editor (since I plan to support drag and drop to and from explorer)
• people might think this rect is not quite right, or want to add a bunch of rect and might be somehow unsatisfied with the editor
  come to think of it, it should not be a big deal to make editing of rect list satisfactory in the editor

Super Lloyd wrote:

As a side note my serializer is open source and it can generate the data model it needs from a serialized data stream, in case people are curious and if I do not share the code (using upcoming .NET Native compile, for example), so people can always very easily reverse engineer data produced by my app...