xmlNode to objects

I have been working with a 3rd party java based REST webservice, that returns an array of xmlNodes.

The xmlNode[] respresent an object and I am trying to work out the best way to Deserialize the xmlNode[] in the object? is it to build up a xmlDocument first and the Deserialize ?

Thanks

Solution

If you have the WCF Rest Starter Kit preview installed, there's a neat trick:

open Visual Studio
select your XML node contents (the XML that makes up one of your nodes) and copy it to the clipboard
from your "Edit" menu in Visual Studio, pick "Paste XML as Types"

This will paste your XML that's on the clipboard into your project as a C# class that is capable of deserializing that exact XML. Pretty nifty!

See these blog posts about it:

That should save you a lot of typing and make life a lot easier!

UPDATE:
OK, you already have your classes generated from the XML you get back. Now you need to convert a XmlNode to your class.

You'll have to do something like this:

private static T ConvertNode<T>(XmlNode node) where T: class
{
    MemoryStream stm = new MemoryStream();

    StreamWriter stw = new StreamWriter(stm);
    stw.Write(node.OuterXml);
    stw.Flush();

    stm.Position = 0;

    XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
    T result = (ser.Deserialize(stm) as T);

    return result;
}

You need to write the XML representation (property .OuterXml) of the XmlNode to a stream (here a MemoryStream) and then use the XmlSerializer to serialize back the object from that stream.

You can do it with the generic method and call

 Customer myCustomer = ConvertNode<Customer>(xmlNode);

or you could even turn that code into either an extension method on the XmlNode class so you could write:

 Customer myCustomer = xmlNode.ConvertNode<Customer>();

Marc