Loading XML Files into VB.Net Structures

Question

I have many, (15-20) different XML files that I need to load to VB.Net. They're designed as they would be in a database; they're designed in Access and bulk exported into XML files. Each file represents a different table in the database.

Now, I need to load this information into VB.Net. Initially, I'd love to use DAO and access the MDB directly via queries, but this won't be possible as I'm making sure the project will be easily ported to XNA/C# down the road. (Xbox 360 cannot use MDBs, so I'd rather deal with this problem now than down the road).

So, I'm stuck now trying to figure out how to wrangle together all of these XML files together. I've tried using Factories to parse each one individually. E.g., if three XML files contain data for a 'character' class, i'd pass in an instance of Character to each XML factory and the classes would apply the necessary data.

I'm trying to get past this though, as maintaining many different classes with redundant code is a pain. plus it is hard to debug as well. So I'm trying to figure out a new solution.

The only thing I can think of right now is using System.Reflection, where I parse through each member of the class/structure I'm instantiating, and then using the names of those members to read in the data from that element of the XML file.

However, this makes the assumption that each member of the structure/class has a matching element in the XML file, and vice-versa.

Answer 1

If you know the schema of the XML files - you could create .NET classes that can deserialize one of those XML files into an instance of a .NET object.

You can also you use xsd.exe (comes with Windows SDK download) to generate the .NET class definition for you if you have an XSD file (or can write an XSD easier than you can write a serializable .NET class).

Answer 2

Linq-to-XML is a good solution (and even better in VB.NET with things like XML Literals and Global Namespaces). Treating multiple XML files as DB tables can be a rough road some times, but certainly not impossible. I guess I'd start with JOIN (even though it has "C#" in the title, the samples are also in VB)..