Question

I am trying to write a class to serialize/deserialize something as simple as:

<table border="1">
 <tr>
 <td>row 1, cell 1</td>
 <td>row 1, cell 2</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>row 2, cell 1</td>
 <td>row 2, cell 2</td>
 </tr>
 </table> 

I have gotten to the point of (see below) but just can’t get it to generate the table xml correctly:

Imports System.Xml.Serialization

<XmlRoot("TABLE")>
Public Class HTMLTable

    <XmlArray("")>
    <XmlArrayItem(GetType(HTMLTableRow), elementName:="TR")>
    Public Property Rows As New List(Of HTMLTableRow)

    <XmlType("TR")>
    Public Class HTMLTableRow

        <XmlArray("TD")>
        Public Property Cells As New List(Of HTMLTableCell)
    End Class

    <XmlType("TD")>
    Public Class HTMLTableCell

        <XmlText()>
        Public Property Value As String
    End Class
   End Class

With a test like:

  <Test()>
    Public Sub SerializeTest()
        Dim tbl As New HTMLTable
        Dim row As New HTMLTable.HTMLTableRow
        Dim cell As New HTMLTable.HTMLTableCell
        row.Cells.Add(cell)
        tbl.Rows.Add(row)
        Debug.Print(XMLProcessor.Serialize(tbl))
    End Sub

I just can’t get it to serialize to this thing. I tried to generate the class using xsd but that produced a lot of garbage code and I really would like to maintain this by hand as it is easier than the monstrosity that xsd produced which didn’t work anyway. What am I doing wrong above?

Answer 1

Try changing:

<XmlArray("")>
<XmlArrayItem(GetType(HTMLTableRow), elementName:="TR")>
Public Property Rows As New List(Of HTMLTableRow)

into:

<XmlElement("TR")>
Public Property Rows As New List(Of HTMLTableRow)

, and change:

<XmlArray("TD")>
Public Property Cells As New List(Of HTMLTableCell)

into:

<XmlElement("TD")>
Public Property Cells As New List(Of HTMLTableCell)

That is how I would set up the attributes when using XmlSerializer for the same task.

I would also move the HTMLTableRow and HTMLTableCell classes out of the HTMLTable class.

On another note, your test method isn’t really a test method, since it doesn’t do any Assert and it doesn’t throw an exception when the result doesn’t meet your requirements!