It may be necessary to access a parent, a sibling, a child, the root, or any other node related to the node being serialized.
For example, internal collection converter for XML needs this.
Because the IDataNodes are immutable there's no direct reference to each parent node.
To facilitate that, the ISerializerContext provides access to the root and the parent node.
The parent node of the current node being serialized will be available in the ISerializationContext inside of the Serialize method on any implementation of I{SerialType}Converter and can be accessed like the following example:
var parent = (IJsonObject)context.ParentNode!;It is important that you know the dataType of the parent up front otherwise your converter will fail.
A real world example needing parent access would be a data format where you need to reference collections on the same level als the node you're referring to. Mavenlink use-case's MavenlinkResponseDataConverter shows an example of where parent access can be useful.
The root node of the current document being serialized will be available in the ICoreContext and thus the ISerializationContext inside of the Serialize method on any implementation of I{SerialType}Converter and can be accessed like the following example:
var parent = (IJsonObject)context.RootNode!;It is important that you know the dataType of the parent up front otherwise your converter will fail.
A real world example needing the root node would be a data format where you need to reference collections via the root of the document, like an id reference pointing to an included collection in the root of the document. Mavenlink use-case's MavenlinkIdReferenceConverter shows an example of where root node access can be useful.