Serialize an object with HashTable property and store in CouchBase

Question

Our team has chosen Couchbase as the cache for our application. What we store in this cache are objects look like this

public class CatalogEntity
{
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Name { get; set; }

    // this property gives us trouble
    public Hashtable Attributes { get; set;}
}

In our code, after retrieve an object from the CouchBase cache, I found that properties of primary types(Id and Name) are properly deserialized, but the Attributes of Hashtable type is not deserialized and stay as JSON. For example, if I have something like

var entity = new CatalogEntity();
entity.Attributes["foo"] = new Foo();

The object from cache will have Attributes["foo"] property as JSON representation of the Foo class.

I am wondering how to have the Hashtable type properly serialize/deserialized? Should I serialize the object to binary and instead store binary stream in the CouchBase?

Answer 1

Is there a reason you need to use Hashtable? Can you use, for instance, a Dictionary<string,string> instead?

I think the reason for what you're seeing is Json.NET's best attempt to serialize a hashtable (see also this question on StackOverflow: Serialize hashtable using Json.Net).