Unity deserializing an object in another project - class

Question

I am creating a tool that helps the artist in my studio design their UI easily, and then give them the ability to export the UI to the developers to use in their projects.
Long story short, I followed this tutorial: What is the best way to save game state?
and it worked correctly when I wrote everything in the same script.
However when I opened another unity project to import the data, it stopped working correctly. It would read the file, but then the spawnObject variable which is supposed to be instantiated stays null.
The class I use here is called UIdata, and it has only one gameobject variable which is inputObject, and the class is exactly the same as the one I am exporting from the other project
I am not quite sure why it is not working, can deserialization work if its importing something from another project?
Here is my code:
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEngine.UI;
using System.Linq;
using System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary;
using System.IO;
using System.Runtime.Serialization;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.Xml;
using System;
public class DataSaver
{
public static void saveData<T>(T dataToSave, string dataFileName)
{
string tempPath = Application.streamingAssetsPath + "/newUICorrect.txt";
string jsonData = JsonUtility.ToJson(dataToSave, true);
byte[] jsonByte = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(jsonData);
if (!Directory.Exists(Path.GetDirectoryName(tempPath)))
{
Directory.CreateDirectory(Path.GetDirectoryName(tempPath));
}
try
{
File.WriteAllBytes(tempPath, jsonByte);
Debug.Log("Saved Data to: " + tempPath.Replace("/", "\\"));
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Debug.LogWarning("Failed To PlayerInfo Data to: " + tempPath.Replace("/", "\\"));
Debug.LogWarning("Error: " + e.Message);
}
}
public static T loadData<T>(string dataFileName)
{
string tempPath = Application.streamingAssetsPath + "/newUICorrect.txt";
if (!Directory.Exists(Path.GetDirectoryName(tempPath)))
{
Debug.LogWarning("Directory does not exist");
return default(T);
}
if (!File.Exists(tempPath))
{
Debug.Log("File does not exist");
return default(T);
}
else
{
Debug.Log("found file");
}
byte[] jsonByte = null;
try
{
jsonByte = File.ReadAllBytes(tempPath);
Debug.Log("Loaded Data from: " + tempPath.Replace("/", "\\"));
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Debug.LogWarning("Failed To Load Data from: " + tempPath.Replace("/", "\\"));
Debug.LogWarning("Error: " + e.Message);
}
string jsonData = Encoding.ASCII.GetString(jsonByte);
object resultValue = JsonUtility.FromJson<T>(jsonData);
return (T)Convert.ChangeType(resultValue, typeof(T));
}
}
[System.Serializable]
public class UIData
{
public GameObject inputObject;
}
public class LoadingScript : MonoBehaviour
{
private GameObject objectToSpawn;
void Start()
{
}
void Update()
{
if (Input.GetKeyDown(KeyCode.I))
{
importObject();
}
}
public void importObject()
{
UIData loadedData = new UIData();
loadedData = DataSaver.loadData<UIData>("UI");
objectToSpawn = loadedData.inputObject;
if (loadedData == null)
{
return;
}
print(objectToSpawn);
}
}

Answer 1

#Programmer is correct, you cannot serialize engine types. There are several ways to go about resolving your issue. The first is to rebuild your gameobject by serializing its MonoBehaviour components in the following manner (pseudocode):
public GameObject TestSaveAndLoadComponent(MyMonoBehaviour myComponent, GameObject objectToLoadComponentOnto){
// convert component to Json
string jsonString = JsonUtility.ToJson(myComponent);
// Pretend to save the json string to File
string directory = "TestDirectory";
string file = "objectFile";
SaveLoadData.SaveString(directory,file,objectJson);
// load string from file
string loadString = SaveLoadData.LoadString(directory,file);
// add a MonoBehaviour component to the object so that it can be
// overwritten by the JsonUtility
MyMonoBehaviour componentToOverwrite = objectToLoadComponentOnto.AddComponent<MyMonoBehaviour>();
JsonUtility.FromJsonOverwrite(loadString, componentToOverwrite);
return newObject;
}
JsonUtility may not provide a deep copy of your your monoBehaviour class, I don't use it much. It's pretty bare bones, and if it doesn't meet your needs, there's always Json.Net for unity.
All that being said, you shouldn't need to serialize gameObjects or monobehaviours if you structure your code in the proper way, using an Model-view-controller pattern. In such a case you would only need to serialize very simple classes that define the Model for the UI, and then the your view classes would rebuild the ui in a separate scene or project from the given model.