I’ve been working with a lot of external systems lately that have their own objects that they serialize into either JSON or XML, and have found some good to tools to rebuild those objects into C# classes that i can add to my apps.

For XML I’ve found this one (http://xmltocsharp.azurewebsites.net/)

Some Example XML from one of the Apps I’ve been working with (This was a sample on their website)

<reply>
    <contents>...</contents>
    <attachment filename="..." md5="...">
      <!-- base-64 encoded file contents -->
    </attachment>
  </reply>

The tools nicely converts to the below C#

[XmlRoot(ElementName="attachment")]
public class Attachment {
[XmlAttribute(AttributeName="filename")]
public string Filename { get; set; }
[XmlAttribute(AttributeName="md5")]
public string Md5 { get; set; }
}

[XmlRoot(ElementName="reply")]
public class Reply {
[XmlElement(ElementName="contents")]
public string Contents { get; set; }
[XmlElement(ElementName="attachment")]
public Attachment Attachment { get; set; }
}

Then i can use the following code to deserialise their Response Stream from the HTTP response

Reply reply=new Reply ();
var resp = CallA MethodThatReturnsaStreamResposne();
using (var sr = new StreamReader(resp))
{
var xs = new XmlSerializer(reply.GetType());
reply= (Model.Tickets)(xs.Deserialize(sr));
}

Pretty similar with JSON too, using this site (http://json2csharp.com/)

However they don’t support invalid names, so i am going to use one int his example and how to work around it.

{".Name":"Jon Smith"}

public class RootObject
{
    public string __invalid_name__.Name { get; set; }
}

JSON properties support dashes and periods, which are not supported in C#, so in C# there is support for a attribute “jsonproperty” that you can use like the below to fix the issue.

 
public class RootObject
{
    [JsonProperty(".Name")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

Then to deserialize I use the Newtonsoft JSON libraries example below

var del = message.GetBody<string>();
var myObject = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<RootObject>(del); 

Obviously thought you would not leave it named as “RootObject” though 🙂

In the example above i was reading a JSON object from a Azure Service Bus Queue.

Lastly, thought i would add in the class i use for going back to XML. In this case i was working on today I was going to a PHP based system Kayako and it has some strange requirements.

I created a class to inherit my XML objects from so add an extension method.

     public class XmlDataType
    {
        public string ToXmlString()
        {
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            string retval = null;
            
            using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(sb, new XmlWriterSettings() {Encoding = Encoding.UTF8}))//{OmitXmlDeclaration = true}
            {
                var ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
                
                ns.Add("", "");
                new XmlSerializer(this.GetType(),new XmlAttributeOverrides() { }).Serialize(writer, this,ns);
                retval = sb.ToString();
            }
            return retval.Replace("utf-16","UTF-8");
        }
    }

Kayako only accepts UTF8 not UTF16, adn you need to remove the xmlns properties, which i do with the Namespace declaration above.

The way I’ve changed UTF16 to 8 is a bit dodgy but it works for Kayako.

Now i can just call MyObject.ToXmlString() and get a string for the XML data that i can pass into a HTTP Request.

Noting that some of the Kayako methods don’t like the xml tag at the start, so if you need to remove this I’ve left in a bit of commented out code that you can use in the XML Writer settings initialization.