Design pattern to populate an object with xml

Question

I have an object to populate with xml. I think that I might use a contructor which accept this xml to build the object. But, is there a better design pattern to do it ? Is it to the object to handle all the xml parsing ?

Thank you !

Answer 1

No you should not send the xml to the constructor because you are coupling the model with deserilizing logic. You should create a class that handles the deserlization for you and return an instance. Why this is important might be unclear. But imagine in the future you may have the data coming from a database, you don't want to pass the database connection to the constructor, do you? Instead you can create a different class that uses databases to generate an instance of your class.

Here are some good read:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Builder_pattern

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immutable_object

Answer 2

The simplest approach would be to let XmlSerializer do it for you. Just decorate it (if necessary) so that it knows how to map the xml, and call Deserialize.

Answer 3

if you receive XML as a string which requires special parsing, you can, I guess, create a manager/factory to construct your object:

           var myObject = MyObjectCustomXmlSerializer.Deserialize(xmlString);