Controlling serialization

the default serialization mechanism is trivial to use. But what if you have special needs? Perhaps you have special security issues and you don’t want to serialize portions of your object, or perhaps it just doesn’t make sense for one subobject to be serialized if that part needs to be created anew when the object is recovered.

 

You can control the process of serialization by implementing the

Externalizable interface instead of theSerializableinterface. TheExternalizableinterface extends the Serializable interface and adds two methods,writeExternal( )andreadExternal( ), that are automatically called for your object during serialization and deserialization so that you can perform your special operations.

 

package blips;

// Simple use of Externalizable & a pitfall.
import java.io.*;

class Blip1 implements Externalizable {
  public Blip1() {
    System.out.println("Blip1 Constructor");
  }
  @Override public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput out)
      throws IOException {
    System.out.println("Blip1.writeExternal");
  }
  @Override public void readExternal(ObjectInput in)
     throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
    System.out.println("Blip1.readExternal");
  }
}

class Blip2 implements Externalizable {
  public Blip2() { //mush be public constructor
    System.out.println("Blip2 Constructor");
  }
  @Override public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput out)
      throws IOException {
    System.out.println("Blip2.writeExternal");
  }
  @Override public void readExternal(ObjectInput in)
     throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
    System.out.println("Blip2.readExternal");
  }
}

class Blip3 implements Externalizable {
    private int i;
    private String s; // No initialization
    public Blip3() {
       System.out.println("Blip3 Constructor");
    // s, i not initialized
    }
    public Blip3(String x, int a) {
        System.out.println("Blip3(String x, int a)");
        s = x;
        i = a;
    // s & i initialized only in non-default constructor.
    }
    public String toString() { return s + i; }
    public void writeExternal(ObjectOutput out)throws IOException {
        System.out.println("Blip3.writeExternal");
        // You must do this:
        out.writeObject(s);
        out.writeInt(i);
    }
    public void readExternal(ObjectInput in)throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
        System.out.println("Blip3.readExternal");
        // You must do this:
        s = (String)in.readObject();
        i = in.readInt();
    }
}

public class Blips {
  public static void main(String[] args)
  throws IOException, ClassNotFoundException {
      
    System.out.println("Constructing objects:");
    Blip1 b1 = new Blip1();
    Blip2 b2 = new Blip2();
    
    ObjectOutputStream o = new ObjectOutputStream(
      new FileOutputStream("Blips.out"));
    System.out.println("Saving objects:");
    o.writeObject(b1);
    o.writeObject(b2);
    o.close();
    
    ObjectInputStream in = new ObjectInputStream(
      new FileInputStream("Blips.out"));
    System.out.println("Recovering b1:");
    b1 = (Blip1)in.readObject();
    // OOPS! Throws an exception:
    System.out.println("Recovering b2:");
    b2 = (Blip2)in.readObject();
    
     System.out.println("Constructing objects:");
    Blip3 b3 = new Blip3("A String ", 47);
    System.out.println(b3);
    
    o = new ObjectOutputStream(
      new FileOutputStream("Blip3.out"));
    System.out.println("Saving object:");
    o.writeObject(b3);
    o.close();

    in = new ObjectInputStream(new FileInputStream("Blip3.out"));
    System.out.println("Recovering b3:");
    b3 = (Blip3)in.readObject();
    System.out.println(b3);
  }
}