Serialize Error during save file using DataContractSerialize - c#

i use this code for serialize needed objects (use DataContractSerialier)
try
{
using (var stream = File.OpenWrite(filePath))
{
var dcs = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));
dcs.WriteObject(stream, obj);
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw new Exception("Error during write object to xml file", ex);
}
i don't understand, but sometimes this method append to end of xml-file some additional symbols. for example :"eInfo>" ( when i deleted 'eInfo>' deserialization works good). i found this when do high load testing (call this method 12000 times without stoping). maybe i can checking that file was saved correctly (try to deserialize saved file), but i think that it bad idea, because we need to run deserialize procees any time when save xml-file.

That is because File.OpenWrite does not truncate the existing data. You are over-writing a file with less data. The garbage at the end is whatever was left over from the original file. I suggest you use File.Create (which is actually create or overwrite-with-truncate), or explicitly specify truncate, or call .SetLength(0) before writing.

Related

I want to back up the data in an xml file, I couldn't find how to save the newly received data without adding the same data to the existing file

I want to back up the data for today's date in an XML file every 10 minutes I managed to create the XML file, but I couldn't find how to save the newly received data without adding the same data to the existing file
Can I convert the file I created to dataSet with dataSet.ReadXml, add the new data I got from the query and convert it back to an XML file and save it? What method should I use?
String QueryString = "SELECT * FROM dbo.db_records WHERE DAY(datetime) = DAY(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP)";
public void run()
{
while (true)
{
try
{
Thread.Sleep(600000);
if (odbcConnection.State != ConnectionState.Open)
{
odbcConnection.Close();
odbcConnection.Open();
}
DataSet dataSet = new DataSet("XMLDB");
odbcDataAdapter.Fill(dataSet, "#ID");
if (File.Exists(Path))
{
}
else
{
using (FileStream fs = File.Create(Path))
{
dataSet.WriteXml(fs);
}
}
}
catch (Exception) { }
}
}
Xml is not a great format if you want to append data, since it uses tags that need to be closed. So you have a few options:
Save separate files
Since you seem to fetch data for the current day, just attach date-info to your file-name. When reading the data you may need to read all files in the folder fitting the pattern, and merge it.
Use a format that is trivial to append
If your data model is simple tabular data you may use a .csv file instead. You can add data to this using one of the File.Append methods.
Overwrite all data
Get the complete data you want to save each time, and overwrite any existing data. This is simple, but may be slow if you have lots of data. But if the database is small and grow slowly this might be perfectly fine.
Parse the existing data
You could read the existing file with Readxml as you suggest, and use DataSet.Merge to merge it with your new set before overwriting the existing file. This may also be slow, since it needs to process all the data. But it may put less load on the database than fetching all data from the database each time.
In any case, you might want to periodically save full backups, or have some other way to handle corrupt files. You should also have some way to test the backups. I would also consider using the backup options built into most database engines if that is an alternative.

What could cause an XML file to be filled with null characters?

This is a tricky question. I suspect it will require some advanced knowledge of file systems to answer.
I have a WPF application, "App1," targeting .NET framework 4.0. It has a Settings.settings file that generates a standard App1.exe.config file where default settings are stored. When the user modifies settings, the modifications go in AppData\Roaming\MyCompany\App1\X.X.0.0\user.config. This is all standard .NET behavior. However, on occasion, we've discovered that the user.config file on a customer's machine isn't what it's supposed to be, which causes the application to crash.
The problem looks like this: user.config is about the size it should be if it were filled with XML, but instead of XML it's just a bunch of NUL characters. It's character 0 repeated over and over again. We have no information about what had occurred leading up to this file modification.
We can fix that problem on a customer's device if we just delete user.config because the Common Language Runtime will just generate a new one. They'll lose the changes they've made to the settings, but the changes can be made again.
However, I've encountered this problem in another WPF application, "App2," with another XML file, info.xml. This time it's different because the file is generated by my own code rather than by the CLR. The common themes are that both are C# WPF applications, both are XML files, and in both cases we are completely unable to reproduce the problem in our testing. Could this have something to do with the way C# applications interact with XML files or files in general?
Not only can we not reproduce the problem in our current applications, but I can't even reproduce the problem by writing custom code that generates errors on purpose. I can't find a single XML serialization error or file access error that results in a file that's filled with nulls. So what could be going on?
App1 accesses user.config by calling Upgrade() and Save() and by getting and setting the properties. For example:
if (Settings.Default.UpgradeRequired)
{
Settings.Default.Upgrade();
Settings.Default.UpgradeRequired = false;
Settings.Default.Save();
}
App2 accesses info.xml by serializing and deserializing the XML:
public Info Deserialize(string xmlFile)
{
if (File.Exists(xmlFile) == false)
{
return null;
}
XmlSerializer xmlReadSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Info));
Info overview = null;
using (StreamReader file = new StreamReader(xmlFile))
{
overview = (Info)xmlReadSerializer.Deserialize(file);
file.Close();
}
return overview;
}
public void Serialize(Info infoObject, string fileName)
{
XmlSerializer writer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Info));
using (StreamWriter fileWrite = new StreamWriter(fileName))
{
writer.Serialize(fileWrite, infoObject);
fileWrite.Close();
}
}
We've encountered the problem on both Windows 7 and Windows 10. When researching the problem, I came across this post where the same XML problem was encountered in Windows 8.1: Saved files sometime only contains NUL-characters
Is there something I could change in my code to prevent this, or is the problem too deep within the behavior of .NET?
It seems to me that there are three possibilities:
The CLR is writing null characters to the XML files.
The file's memory address pointer gets switched to another location without moving the file contents.
The file system attempts to move the file to another memory address and the file contents get moved but the pointer doesn't get updated.
I feel like 2 and 3 are more likely than 1. This is why I said it may require advanced knowledge of file systems.
I would greatly appreciate any information that might help me reproduce, fix, or work around the problem. Thank you!
It's well known that this can happen if there is power loss. This occurs after a cached write that extends a file (it can be a new or existing file), and power loss occurs shortly thereafter. In this scenario the file has 3 expected possible states when the machine comes back up:
1) The file doesn't exist at all or has its original length, as if the write never happened.
2) The file has the expected length as if the write happened, but the data is zeros.
3) The file has the expected length and the correct data that was written.
State 2 is what you are describing. It occurs because when you do the cached write, NTFS initially just extends the file size accordingly but leaves VDL (valid data length) untouched. Data beyond VDL always reads back as zeros. The data you were intending to write is sitting in memory in the file cache. It will eventually get written to disk, usually within a few seconds, and following that VDL will get advanced on disk to reflect the data written. If power loss occurs before the data is written or before VDL gets increased, you will end up in state 2.
This is fairly easy to repro, for example by copying a file (the copy engine uses cached writes), and then immediately pulling the power plug on your computer.
I had a similar problem and I was able to trace my problem to corrupted HDD.
Description of my problem (all related informations):
Disk attached to mainboard (SATA):
SSD (system),
3 * HDD.
One of the HDD's had a bad blocks and there were even problems reading the disk structure (directories and file listing).
Operation system: Windows 7 x64
file system (on all disks): NTFS
When the system tried to read or write to the corrupted disk (user request or automatic scan or any other reason) and the attempt failed, all write operations (to other disk's) were incorrect. The files created on system disk (mostly configuration files by another applications) were written and were valid (probably because the files were cashed in RAM) on direct check of file content.
Unfortunately, after a restart, all the files (written after the failed write/read access on corrupted drive) had the correct size, but the content of the files was 'zero byte' (exactly like in your case).
Try rule out hardware related problems. You can try to check 'copy' the file (after a change) to a different machine (upload to web/ftp). Or try to save specific content to a fixed file. When the check file on different will be correct, or when the fixed content file will be 'empty', the reason is probably on local machine. Try to change HW components, or reinstall the system.
There is no documented reason for this behavior, as this is happening to users but nobody can tell the origin of this odd conditions.
It might be CLR problem, although this is a very unlikely, the CLR doesn't just write null characters and XML document cannot contain null characters if there's no xsi:nil defined for the nodes.
Anyway, the only documented way to fix this is to delete the corrupted file using this line of code:
try
{
ConfigurationManager.OpenExeConfiguration(ConfigurationUserLevel.PerUserRoamingAndLocal);
}
catch (ConfigurationErrorsException ex)
{
string filename = ex.Filename;
_logger.Error(ex, "Cannot open config file");
if (File.Exists(filename) == true)
{
_logger.Error("Config file {0} content:\n{1}", filename, File.ReadAllText(filename));
File.Delete(filename);
_logger.Error("Config file deleted");
Properties.Settings.Default.Upgrade();
// Properties.Settings.Default.Reload();
// you could optionally restart the app instead
}
else
{
_logger.Error("Config file {0} does not exist", filename);
}
}
It will restore the user.config using the Properties.Settings.Default.Upgrade();
again without null values.
I ran into a similar issue but it was on a server. The server restarted while a program was writing to a file which caused the file to contain all null characters and become unusable to the program writing/reading from it.
So the file looked like this:
The logs showed that the server restarted:
The corrupted file showed that it was last updated at the time of the restart:
I have the same problem, there is an extra "NUL" character at the end of serialized xml file:
I am using XMLWriter like this:
using (var stringWriter = new Utf8StringWriter())
{
using (var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(stringWriter, new XmlWriterSettings { Indent = true, IndentChars = "\t", NewLineChars = "\r\n", NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.Replace }))
{
xmlSerializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, data, nameSpaces);
xml = stringWriter.ToString();
var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument();
xmlDocument.LoadXml(xml);
if (removeEmptyNodes)
{
RemoveEmptyNodes(xmlDocument);
}
xml = xmlDocument.InnerXml;
}
}

Serialize to an XML document without overwriting previous data

I need to serialize to an XML document without overwriting the data that is currently in there. I have a method that does this and it will save to the xml file, but will delete whatever is currently in that file upon serializing. Below is the code.
public void SaveSubpart()
{
SOSDocument doc = new SOSDocument();
doc.ID = 1;
doc.Subpart = txtSubpart.Text;
doc.Title = txtTitle.Text;
doc.Applicability = txtApplicability.Text;
doc.Training = txtTraining.Text;
doc.URL = txtUrl.Text;
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/Contents.xml"));
System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer serializer;
try
{
serializer = new System.Xml.Serialization.XmlSerializer(doc.GetType());
serializer.Serialize(writer, doc);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
//e-mail admin - serialization failed
}
finally
{ writer.Close(); }
}
The contract for the StreamWriter constructor taking only a filename says that if the named file exists, it is overwritten. So this has nothing to do with serializing to XML, per se. You would get the same result if you wrote to the stream through some other means.
The way to do what you are looking for is to read the old XML file into memory, make whatever changes are necessary, and then serialize and write the result to disk.
And even if it was possible to transparently modify an on-disk XML file, that's almost certainly what would happen under the hood because it's the only way to really do it. Yes, you probably could fiddle around with seeking and writing directly on disk, but what if something caused the file to change on disk while you were doing that? If you do the read/modify/write sequence, then you lose out on the changes that were made after you read the file into memory; but if you modify the file directly on disk by seeking and writing, you would be almost guaranteed to end up with the file in an inconsistent state.
And of course, you could only do it if you could fit whatever changes you wanted to make into the bytes that were already on disk...
If concurrency is a problem, either use file locking or use a proper database with transactional support.
try this:
StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(Server.MapPath("~/App_Data/Contents.xml"),true);
this determines to append the data to the file.
true=append,
false = overwrite
more info http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/36b035cb.aspx
So what you want to implement is to serialize an object without overwriting it to an existing file.
Thus
XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(doc.GetType());
TextWriter w = new StringWriter();
s.Serialize(w, doc);
var yourXMLstring = w.ToString();
Then you can process this xml string and append it to existing xml file if you want to.
XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml(yourXMLstring );

Exists, Read and Write in just one step

I'm trying to find out if a file exists, if it does, verify if the css style already exists, if not, write them at the end of the file ...
I'm doing all this already but in 3 steps:
Does the file exist?
FileInfo fi= new FileInfo(Path.Combine(rootPath, "DefaultStyles.css");
If it does, I use TextReader to get the contents
using (TextReader tr = new StreamReader(file))
{
r = tr.ReadToEnd().Contains(".onebyonecard");
tr.Close();
}
Then I write into it if style was not found
using (TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter(file))
{
tw.Write(cssStyle);
tw.Close();
}
Is there a way to do this in one easy open / close, instead needed to open the file over and over?
Well you can open a single stream for read and write - but given that you're reading the whole file, I would personally just open it twice. Note that your current code will overwrite the file, not append to it.
I would personally use the static methods in the File class:
// Elide this into the "if" condition if you want. I've separated it out here,
// but obviously it makes no difference.
bool present = File.Exists(path) &&
File.ReadAllText(path).Contains(".onebyonecard);
if (!present)
{
File.AppendAllText(path, cssStyle);
}
This is simpler than having a read/write stream and creating both a TextReader and a TextWriter over it.
A couple of notes:
By separating the file access, there is a slight risk of a race condition. We could open the file, read the contents, then it could be updated while we decide what to do next. Likewise the file could exist when we perform the check, but then be deleted before it's read. In most applications this risk is so slight as to be irrelevant - only you can say for sure.
The code above could still throw an exception, if the file exists but can't be read/written by the relevant user, or is in use by another process. Normal exception handling style applies - decide to what extent you think you can actually recover from such situations, and act appropriately.
Well, since you are using ReadToEnd() you might as well use:
if (!File.Exists(file) || !File.ReadAllText(file).Contains(".onebyonecard"))
File.AppendAllText(file, cssStyle);
but this still opens it twice. There are APIs that would allow it to be opened once only, but those are binary APIs (Stream etc) - which will work, but are probably overkill for your scenario.
try
{
TextReader tr = new StreamReader(file);
r = tr.ReadToEnd().Contains(".onebyonecard");
tr.Close();
tr.Dispose ();
}
catch { //File is not exists or is used by another application
}

Can DeflateStream or GZipStream be used to deflate an uncompressed file?

I'm trying to implement file compression to an application. The application has been around for a while, so it needs to be able to read uncompressed documents written by previous versions. I expected that DeflateStream would be able to process an uncompressed file, but for GZipStream I get the "The magic number in GZip header is not correct" error. For DeflateStream I get "Found invalid data while decoding". I guess it does not find the header that marks the file as the type it is.
If it's not possible to simply process an uncompressed file, then 2nd best would be to have a way to determine whether a file is compressed, and choose the method of reading the file. I've found this link: http://blog.somecreativity.com/2008/04/08/how-to-check-if-a-file-is-compressed-in-c/, but this is very implementation specific, and doesn't feel like the right approach. It can also provide false positives (I'm sure this would be rare, but it does indicate that it's not the right approach).
A 3rd option I've considered is to attempt using DeflateStream, and fallback to normal stream IO if an exception occurs. This also feels messy, and causes VS to break at the exception (unless I untick that exception, which I don't really want to have to do).
Of course, I may simply be going about it the wrong way. This is the code I've tried in .Net 3.5:
Stream reader = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, readOnly ? FileAccess.Read : FileAccess.ReadWrite, readOnly ? FileShare.ReadWrite : FileShare.Read);
using (DeflateStream decompressedStream = new DeflateStream(reader, CompressionMode.Decompress))
{
workspace = (Workspace)new XmlSerializer(typeof(Workspace)).Deserialize(decompressedStream);
if (readOnly)
{
reader.Close();
workspace.FilePath = fileName;
}
else
workspace.SetOpen(reader, fileName);
}
Any ideas?
Thanks!
Luke.
Doesn't your file format have a header? If not, now is the time to add one (you're changing the file format by supporting compression, anyway). Pick a good magic value, make sure the header is extensible (add a version field, or use specific magic values for specific versions), and you're ready to go.
Upon loading, check for the magic value. If not present, use your current legacy loading routines. If present, the header will tell you whether the contents are compressed or not.
Update
Compressing the stream means the file is no longer an XML document, and thus there's not much reason to expect the file can't contain more than your data stream. You really do want a header identifying your file :)
The below is example (pseudo)-code; I don't know if .net has a "substream", SubRangeStream is likely something you'll have to code yourself (DeflateStream probably adds it's own header, so a substream might not be necessary; could turn out useful further down the road, though).
Int64 oldPosition = reader.Position;
reader.Read(magic, 0, magic.length);
if(IsRightMagicValue(magic))
{
Header header = ReadHeader(reader);
Stream furtherReader = new SubRangeStream(reader, reader.Position, header.ContentLength);
if(header.IsCompressed)
{
furtherReader = new DeflateStream(furtherReader, CompressionMode.Decompress);
}
XmlSerializer xml = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Workspace));
workspace = (Workspace) xml.Deserialize(furtherReader);
} else
{
reader.Position = oldPosition;
LegacyLoad(reader);
}
In real-life, I would do things a bit differently - some proper error handling and cleanup, for instance. Also, I wouldn't have the new loader code directly in the IsRightMagicValue block, but rather I'd spin off the work either based on the magic value (one magic value per file version), or I would keep a "common header" portion with fields common to all versions. For both, I'd use a Factory Method to return an IWorkspaceReader depending on the file version.
Can't you just create a wrapper class/function for reading the file and catch the exception? Something like
try
{
// Try return decompressed stream
}
catch(InvalidDataException e)
{
// Assume it is already decompressed and return it as it is
}

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