what's the best way to automate generation of an xsd given an xml sample?

Question

I have a chunk of xml data that's coming out of a database that I need to generate an xsd for. Got it all working using xsd.exe but all the elements are showing up as string, even things like 2079.0200. How do I get xsd.exe to guess at types? Would the XmlSchemaExporter class be able to do this?

The issue here is that Visual Studio is generating the xsd that I want (with decimal types etc) when I use the XML --> Create Schema command, but I don't want to have to do this by hand. I'm setting up a process that takes in a chunk of xml and generates an XSD. But it needs to have more types than just "string".

Related, but don't know if it's a solution yet (XmlSchemaInference class): http://stackoverflow.com/questions/74879/any-tools-to-generate-an-xsd-schema-from-an-xml-instance-document

Answer 1

The solution is to create the schema by hand, based on the one that's been generated. Then don't run XSD.EXE again.

Answer 2

John's answer is valid for situations where accuracy is more important than speed. For my situation, I needed many schemas that were identical to what would be produced via the VS "Create Schema" command. So accuracy wasn't as important as matching a known baseline and speed.

This is what I ended up doing. It produced output identical to the VS "Create Schema" command:

XmlSchemaInference inf = new XmlSchemaInference();

// xml variable on the next line is a string being passed in
XmlSchemaSet schemas = inf.InferSchema(new XmlTextReader(xml, XmlNodeType.Element, null));
schemas.Compile();

XmlSchema[] schemaArray = new XmlSchema[1];
schemas.CopyTo(schemaArray, 0);
XmlTextWriter wr = new XmlTextWriter(xsdOutputFileNameAndPath, Encoding.UTF8);
wr.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
schemaArray[0].Write(wr);
wr.Close();