Decimal Serialization Inconsistency?

[James Koch]

I must be missing something here...

The inconsistency described below is minorly annoying in a current
project. Can anyone come up w/ an explanation?

I've got two seemingly identical object graphs which serialize to
XML. Each has some decimal properties, ex:

class Widget
{
public decimal SubTotal { get; set; }
public decimal Tax { get; set; }
}

When I serialize each graph, some of the decimals which are zero come
out as "0" while others come out as "0.00". Specifically:

widgetA <SubTotal>0</SubTotal><Tax>0</Tax>
widgetB <SubTotal>0.00</SubTotal><Tax>0</Tax>

Comparing the objects in memory, the following all evaluate to true:
widgetA.SubTotal == widgetB.SubTotal
widgetA.Tax == widgetB.Tax
widgetA.SubTotal * 1000000 == widgetB.SubTotal * 1000000
widgetA.SubTotal * 1000000m == widgetB.SubTotal * 1000000m

I'm trying to find some rhyme or reason to this behavior. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

James

[jasonterando]

The only thing I can figure out is that the "decimal" data type stores
the precision used to assign to it as well as the value itself. Your
post, though, inspired a solution to the problem. I'm using a class
generated by Microsoft's xsd.exe utility. The class contains a
decimal field and our client wants us to write out values with two
decimal places.

So, I tried the following, and it appears to work:

/// Override for Amount output
[System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAttributeAttribute()]
public decimal Amount {
get {
return this.amountField;
}
set {
this.amountField = decimal.Parse(string.Format("{0:###0.00}",
value));
}
}

On Oct 30, 12:38 pm, James Koch <[e-mail]:

I must be missing something here...

The inconsistency described below is minorly annoying in a current
project. Can anyone come up w/ an explanation?

I've got two seemingly identical object graphs which serialize to
XML. Each has some decimal properties, ex:

class Widget
{
public decimal SubTotal { get; set; }
public decimal Tax { get; set; }

}

When I serialize each graph, some of the decimals which are zero come
out as "0" while others come out as "0.00". Specifically:

widgetA <SubTotal>0</SubTotal><Tax>0</Tax>
widgetB <SubTotal>0.00</SubTotal><Tax>0</Tax>

Comparing the objects in memory, the following all evaluate to true:
widgetA.SubTotal == widgetB.SubTotal
widgetA.Tax == widgetB.Tax
widgetA.SubTotal * 1000000 == widgetB.SubTotal * 1000000
widgetA.SubTotal * 1000000m == widgetB.SubTotal * 1000000m

I'm trying to find some rhyme or reason to this behavior. Any ideas?
Thanks in advance!

James