Question

I am working on an app that needs to deserialize a XML document that looks like this:

<results>
  <item ...>
  </item>
  <item ...>
  </item>
  <item ...>
  </item>
  ...
</results>

So I’ve set up an object model like this:

[XmlRoot("results")]
public class Results 
{
  [XmlArray("item")]
  [XmlArrayItem("item", typeof(Item))]
  public List<Item> Items { get; set; }
}

public class Item
{ 
  [XmlElement("name")]
  public string Name { get; set; }

  [XmlElement("description")]
  public string Description { get; set; }

  . . . 
}

I have tried many variations in how the Items collection is declared and annotated, but regardless I never get any items in that collection. Are there issues in .NET around deserializing arrays that are not contained within a common parent element (i.e., what might be in this example)?

I do not have control over the format of this XML so I have to make it work as is. I am currently using XDocument/XElement/XAttribute to read and parse the XML manually, but that’s a pain. Any ideas why this isn’t working?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

A little known secret seems to be the XSD.exe utility that ships with Visual Studio. Among other things it can do, two features you will need:

Generate an XSD from an XML file

c:\>xsd myfile.xml

This will infer an XSD from your XML and spit it out on disk. Which you can then take and:

Generate a C# class from the XSD file

c:\>xsd myfile.xsd /classes

This will generate a series of C# classes with all the necessary serialization attributes on them. You don’t have to use them directly, but you could certainly figure out how what .Net is expecting.