Deserializing XML into models without all the fuzz [closed]

Question

I have a plain old XML-file. Through some XSD.EXE magic I made a model. Now I want to read the XML data into the model. Normally this is just XmlSerializer.Deserialize, but it keeps complaining about namespaces and whatnot.

Now here is the thing: I don't care about namespaces, or anything else in XML. I just want the deserialization to work with a "simple one-liner". I'm planning to parse a lot of XML in my life and I'm not interested in spending my time fighting a bloated format about details we both know aren't important.

So I'm looking for a XML Deserializer for .Net that removes the fuzz and simply sees a <obj> <Name> ... and puts its data into public string Name { get; set; }. It should not be more difficult than for example MyObj myObj = SimpleXml.Deserialize<MyObj>(xmlString);. Pretty much like JSON deserializers work.

Where can I find an easy to use XML deserializer like the one I described?

I do understand that this limits my XML reading capability.

Answer 1

I am using this kind of helpers for my UI clients.

public string Serialize<T>(T o)
{
    var x = new XDocument();
    using(var w = x.CreateWriter())
        new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)).Serialize(w, o);
    return x.ToString();
}

public T Deserialize<T>(string s)
{
    return
        (T)new XmlSerializer(typeof(T))
        .Deserialize(XDocument.Parse(s)
        .CreateReader());
}

Beware if you are using windows services, there is a known memory leak in Serialization: http://dotnetcodebox.blogspot.fr/2013/01/xmlserializer-class-may-result-in.html

To avoid this, I suggest you to replace the new XmlSerializer of the code above by a method that creates/retrieves XmlSerializers from a cache (a Dictionary for example) as it is explained in the blog post.