How do you take total control over serialization???

Question

Please read this whole post before answering because Ive asked this question twice and people keep telling me things I already know.
ok I posted this b4 and people dont seem to get it so Ill explain everything i know about serialization. To serialize an object you call the writeObject(Object o) from the ObjectOutputStream class. The Object must inherit Serializable (an empty interface). I read in a java book I have that if you put a method with the signature: "private void writeObject(ObjectOutputStream out) throws IOException" into your Serializable class, ObjectOutputStream will call this instead of using its default serialization method. However, when I did this, I started by making my writeObject method empty. Even with it empty I got errors about fields in my class not being Serializable. According to the book however, it should be trying to Serialize them right? So Im guessing that its doing both the default Serialization process and my method (or maybe not even my method). Can someone please tell me how to do this correctly??

Answer 1

idk I didnt implements externalizable because I dont wanna complicate this nemore I just wanna find out why it wont work. I cant post my code because its huge. But basically, I have a JTabbedPane subclass with a Vector of SetPanes in it. SetPane has a field parent which is of type Experiment (the tabbedpane). When I try to Serialize the Experiment, I first got errors because I had JMenu's in my SetPane. to fix this I tried a custom serialization. didnt work. So then I did wat you said, called the function directly. that worked as far as I know (except I had to lose the parent field cause it was recursive). It worked until I had to deserialize it. There is no way to "call the function directly" when your deserializing so I got totally lost. Thats why Im trying to figure out how to use custom serialization the way my book tells me but it wont work!!!