The following questions are about XML serialization/deserialization and schema validation for a .net library of types which are to be used for data exchange.
First question, if I have a custom xml namespace say ‘http://mydomain/mynamespace‘ do I have to add a
[XmlRoot(Namespace = 'http://mydomain/mynamespace')] to every class in my library. Or is there a way to define this namespace as default for the whole assembly?
Second question, is there a reason behind the always added namespaces
xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance' xmlns:xsd='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema' even if there is no actual reference to any of the namespaces? I just feel they add noise to the resulting xml. Is there a way to remove them an only have the custom namespace in the resulting xml?
Third question, are there tools to support the generation of schema definitions (e.g. for all public [Serializable] classes of an assembly) and the validation of xml against specific schemas available?
If there are, would you recommend XML Schema from W3C or RELAX NG?
Just to add – the ‘xsi’ etc is there to support things like xsi:nil on values later on – a well-known pattern for nullable values. It has to write the stream ‘forwards only’, and it doesn’t know (when it writes the first bit) whether it will need nil or not, so it assumes that writing it unnecessarily once is better than having to use the full namespace potentially lots of times.