(De)serialization in Godot

[MathiasBaumgartinger]

I am working on a project, where certain layers can be configured/stored in a json file. Serialization is somewhat straight forward. To deserialize those objects, I want to use Object.get_property_list() to get all members of the corresponding class. The initial idea was to handle the deserialization (i.e. a Resource is stored as path to the resource) via the class_name of the object.

I have a few custom classes which would require more sophisticated (de)serialization. For instance a dictionary of String to a custom Resource. I would need the name of the custom class to handle this specific case. Sadly, Object.get_property_list() only returns the native base class.

For example:

class CustomClass extends RefCounted:
   func _init(): 
     ...

would show "RefCounted" in the property list. In some forum post I read that this was intended behaviour. However, personally I feel this is somewhat of a limitation.

Does anyone have an idea on how I might handle this differently?

[FireCatMagic]

Have you tried Object.get_script().get_script_property_list()?

[MathiasBaumgartinger]

I found that too. The problem with that however, is that it requires me to have an Object of the Class. As I am deserializing a class which has members of another defined class, I have no object for the child classes.

I thought about just initializing an empty class so I could use get_script_property_list(). That seems like a hacky and unclean solution to me though.