There is any tool that creates a class from a XML for deserialization? (C# .NET)

Question

I have this XML file, and I want to deserialize it to an object. But I don't want to type its class definition. There is any tool that can create the C# code of the class for me, inferring the data types from sample data?

Answer 1

Yes. Out of the box, you can use xsd.exe to generate XSD files from XML. You can also use this tool to generate classes from XSD files.

The code it produces is limited, which is why there are some third party tools that have stepped in.

Two of those tools include LiquidXML (costs money) and CodeXS (free). We use CodeXS, because it is free and extensible. We have extended it quite a bit.

EDIT: CodeXS has an online tool. Just give it an XSD. It produces your classes for you. They also have a command-line tool (source code) which is extensible and doesn't require you to send the XSD to their web service. We use it as a pre-build step.

Answer 2

Check out LINQ-to-XSD

It requires that you write a schema for your XML but then it's pretty good about a direct translation to objects.

Answer 3

Liquid Technologies has a good tool for this purpose (Data binding) http://www.liquid-technologies.com/. You'll really need to define a schema though instead of letting such a tool "infer" it from sample data.

One of the benefits of Liquid that we've found is that it can also generate code for Java, C++, C#, VBA etc. All very consistent.