WriteObject<T> in XNA with existing ContentWriters

Question

I have quite a lot of custom content pipeline components, and I was just wondering if under the hood XNA knows about these things when doing its magic...

Here is my scenario.

I have animation objects which basically contain 2d animation frames and timings etc, which can be loaded as self contained objects or can be embedded within other object. Now I was expecting that my CustomObjectAWriter could contain an instance to AnimationObjectAWriter and internally just call through to that to write out each animation object, i.e:

<SomeCustomObjectA>
    <SomeCustomElementA>
        ...
    </SomeCustomElementA>
    <SomeCustomElementB>
        ...
        <AnimationObjectA>
            ...
        </AnimationObjectA>
    </SomeCustomElementB>
</SomeCustomObjectA>

However as AnimationObjectAWriter has its Write method protected I am unable to access it, however I was wondering if WriteObject will know of the AnimationObjectAWriter so if I did WriteObject<AnimationObjectA>(animationObjectAInstance) would this work?

Answer 1

Yes that will work, although if it's just simple XML->objects you probably don't need custom writers/readers at all.

See: Automatic XNB serialization in XNA Game Studio 3.1

See also: Shawn Hargreaves Blog Index: Content Pipeline