XML to IEnumerable<T>

Question

Hi All

Is there a way to Take a given XML file and convert (preferably using C# Generics) it into a Concrete Ienumerable list of T where T is my concrete class

So for example I may have an XML file like

<fruits>
    <fruit>
     <id>1</id>
     <name>apple</name>
    </fruit>
    <fruit>
     <id>2</id>
     <name>orange</name>
    </fruit>
</fruits>

and I would like to see a list of a Fruit Objects

where it has properties like

public class Fruit : IFruit
{
    public string name;
    public int id;
}

I assume I'd need some kind of Mapping if I was to use generics, as I would like this to work for ideally the IFruit interface (not sure if thats possible)

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I'm not sure I fully understand your circumstances, but one approach is to define a data transfer class and make it serializable in XML. Then you can deserialze the XML into an array of objects.

edit

I'm not going to delete this, but I think that what Andrew Hare posted is closer to what you want, and I've up-voted him in support.

Answer 2

Given the following types:

public interface IFruit
{
    String name { get; set; }
    Int32 id { get; set; }
}

public class Fruit : IFruit
{
    public String name { get; set; }
    public Int32 id { get; set; }
}

I think that you could do something like this:

    static IEnumerable<T> GetSomeFruit<T>(String xml)
     where T : IFruit, new()
    {
     return XElement.Parse(xml)
      .Elements("fruit")
      .Select(f => new T {
       name = f.Element("name").Value,
       id = Int32.Parse(f.Element("id").Value)
      });
    }

Which you would call like this:

IEnumerable<Fruit> fruit = GetSomeFruit<Fruit>(yourXml);

Answer 3

Here's a way to do it with serialization, if that's your thing:

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

public static class Test
{
 public static void Main(string[] args)
 {
  var fs = new FileStream("fruits.xml", FileMode.Open);
  var x = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Fruits));
  var fruits = (Fruits) x.Deserialize(fs);
  Console.WriteLine("{0} count: {1}", fruits.GetType().Name, fruits.fruits.Length);
  foreach(var fruit in fruits.fruits)
   Console.WriteLine("id: {0}, name: {1}", fruit.id, fruit.name);
 }
}

[XmlRoot("fruits")]
public class Fruits
{
    [XmlElement(ElementName="fruit")]
    public Fruit[] fruits;
}

public class Fruit
{
    public string name;
    public int id;
}