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Layout Serialization

A NavigationBar layout is defined as the selected pane, buttons visible, pane order, and pane visibility for a NavigationBar control.

Sometimes it is useful to save the layout state of a NavigationBar and restore it later. This allows for end users to retain their customizations across multiple application executions. The way to do this is to persist the NavigationBar layout data.

Note

When persisting layouts, each NavigationPane must have a unique value assigned to its Name property, otherwise the layout cannot be created.

Saving Layout Data

NavigationBar layout data can be persisted in XML format and loaded at a later time. Probably the two most common ways to store layouts are in files and in a database.

The NavigationBarLayoutSerializer class fully implements the XML object hierarchy serialization framework described in the Serialization topic. Please see that topic for a list of methods that can be called for saving to files, string, etc.

This sample code shows how to save a NavigationBar layout to an XML string:

string layout = new NavigationBarLayoutSerializer().SaveToString(navBar);

Loading Layout Data

When loaded, NavigationBar layout data restores the order and visibility states of the panes being managed by the NavigationBar control. It also determines the number of large buttons to display and selects the pane that was selected when the layout was saved.

The layout data loading code matches the Name of panes that were stored in the layout data to the Name of panes contained in the NavigationBar.

The NavigationBarLayoutSerializer class fully implements the XML object hierarchy serialization framework described in the Serialization topic. Please see that topic for a list of methods that can be called for loading from files, string, etc.

This sample code shows how to load a NavigationBar layout from the XML string:

new NavigationBarLayoutSerializer().LoadFromString(layout, navBar);

Persisting Custom Data in the Layout Data

One benefit of our XML object hierarchy serialization framework is that you can insert and later retrieve information anywhere within the serialized data. Any time an object is serialized or deserialized, an event fires. You can intercept this event and save/load custom data.

The Serialization topic explains how to do this.

Optimal Memory Utilization when Using Layout Serializers

The layout serializer uses an XmlSerializer as the core .NET object that reads/writes XML data. One issue that has been discovered in the Microsoft .NET framework is that XmlSerializer is capable of creating memory leaks. The leak occurs whenever a new instance of XmlSerializer is created.

To combat this leak we've implemented some caching code on our end, but also highly recommend that instead of creating a new layout serializer any time you do a layout serialization, you instead keep a reference to a single app-wide instance of the layout serializer and use that for each layout serialization.