Different type for public and private representation

[jwvand...@gmail.com]

Hi there,

I am trying to set up something where the private backing field is a string, but the public property seen by Unity is a Color. I am doing this so that I can store more compact hexadecimal strings on disk, but still work with pickable colors in the editor.

However the properties in the Unity Inspector still act like strings.

[SerializeField]
[Candlelight.PropertyBackingField("Background")]
private string background;

public Color GetBackground()
{
Color c;
if (ColorUtility.TryParseHtmlString(this.background, out c))
{
return c;
}
else
{
this.background = ColorUtility.ToHtmlStringRGBA(new Color(0, 0, 0, 0));
return new Color(0, 0, 0, 0);
}
}

public void SetBackground(Color value)
{
this.background = ColorUtility.ToHtmlStringRGBA(value);
}

[Developer Support]

Hi! Sorry the documentation wasn't clear enough here, but the tool will not change how your backing field is displayed in the Inspector, it will only route the input values through your property (whose type must match that of the backing field or be a more specific type than that specified by the backing field). If you want to serialize a string but display a color picker in the Inspector, you should make you own custom PropertyDrawer/PropertyAttribute