Is an all or nothing affair [closed]

Question

I've been reading an article and the author uses such a phrase :

If our model binder deserialized JSON into a ComicBook it would not be able to make that determination because serialization is an all or nothing affair.

While everything was good but suddenly I saw this "serialization is an all or nothing affair" and it doesn't make much sense to me. Could you please explain what he might be meaning?

Source article in case you want to see more context: http://haacked.com/archive/2011/06/30/whatrsquos-the-difference-between-a-value-provider-and-model-binder.aspx

Answer 1

All or nothing means there is no intermediate state or partial result. A SQL commit should be an "all or nothing affair" for example as either the data is committed to the table or not.

Answer 2

M-W's definition of all or nothing points to their definition of all-or-none:

: marked either by entire or complete operation or effect or by none at all

The next few sentences in the article provide some context:

When serialization fails, all you know is that the format didn’t match the type. You don’t have access to the granular details we need to provide property level validation. So all you’d be able to show your users is an error message stating something went wrong, good luck figuring out what.