Enhanced RTTI support for records and dynamic arrays was added by this commit.

The documentation has been enhanced in synch!
Please ensure that you downloaded the latest SAD 1.18 pdf revision!

Serialization for older Delphi versions

Sadly, the information needed to serialize a record is available only since Delphi 2010.

If your application is developped on any older revision (e.g. Delphi 7, Delphi 2007 or Delphi 2009), you won't be able to automatically serialize records as plain JSON objects directly.

You have several paths available:

  • By default, the record will be serialized as binary, and encoded as Base64 text;
  • Or you can define method callbacks which will write or read the data as you expect;
  • Or you can define the record layout as plain text.

Note that any custom serialization (either via callbacks, or via text definition), will override any previous registered method, even the mechanism using the enhanced RTTI.
You can change the default serialization to easily meet your requirements.

For instance, this is what SynCommons.pas does for any TGUID content, which is serialized as the standard JSON text layout (e.g. "C9A646D3-9C61-4CB7-BFCD-EE2522C8F633"), and not following the TGUID record layout as defined in the RTTI , i.e. "D1":12345678,"D2":23023,"D3":9323,"D4":"0123456789ABCDEF" - which is far from convenient.
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