Question

<FileTransferSettings>   <UploadPath src='user'>C:\uploads</UploadPath>   <DownloadPath src='app'>C:\downloads</DownloadPath> </FileTransferSettings> 

I’d want to deserialize this XML into a FileTransferSettings object with 2 properties – UploadPath and DownloadPath. But I also want to preserve the src attribute for each property in a way that my code can interrogate it.

I think creating an associated UploadPathSrc and DownloadPathSrc property is a bit awkward and cumbersome.

Is there another way to represent this in .NET? To me, the src attribute seems like it should be treated as metadata. Is there a best practice for this?

(For background into why I’m trying to do this – see my previous question).

Thanks.

Answer 1

You could create a second class, FileTransferPath which had a string value ‘Path’ and an enum value ‘Source’

class FileTransferSettings {    public FileTransferPath UploadPath { get; set; }    public FileTransferPath DownloadPath { get; set; }    // ... }  class FileTransferPath {    public string Path { get; set; }    public FileTransferSource Source { get; set}     public enum FileTransferSource    {      None,      User,      Application,      // ...    } } 

Then you could use code like

   obj.UploadPath.Path;    obj.UploadPath.Source; 

There might be better names you could choose for the class properties; I don’t know that I like the repetition of Path. obj.Upload.Path or something might be nicer.

Note that you wouldn’t be able to directly serialize/deserialize this directly to and from the format you have using XmlSerialization; but it does accomplish what you need. (And you can still serialize to XML, you just have to do a little more work)