XSD to .Net Class Code Generator

Code Project - An XSD to .NET language code class generator that adds real punch to Microsoft's XSD Tool

"In document-centric environments where data is persisted as XML documents, the need often arises to provide business logic at various stages during the processing of these documents. One way to do this is to use the System.Xml.XmlDocument class to 'front' the XML document and provide a means to modify the data. However, XmlDocument essentially models the XML structure of the document, and not the data structure of the document itself. Another way to do this would be to provide a data-access layer with classes that model the actual data structure and content itself, and provide serialization support to read and write the data to XML streams.

The advantages of the second approach are significant to the code developer and maintainer:

• The classes can be re-used in the context of other data composition classes.
• The developer works directly with classes and data types that are mostly domain-based, which is semantically easier to understand, more concise to code, and usually the code is a lot easier to read and maintain.
• The code is usually easier to update as the data definitions change.
• Visual Studio automatically provides intellisense prompting for these data types, so coding is faster and less error prone.

...

If the XSD.EXE generated classes are viewed as data-access classes, looking at the code, one realizes that the code is fairly complex to use and encapsulation is not really provided as all attributes are defined as public fields. In fact, the code, although simple, is quite ugly, and does not conform to many of the practices applied in the production of robust application code.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the XSD tool output code can be modified to provide better encapsulation, robustness, and ease-of-use.

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I have a very near future feature where I need to consume a XML file, parse it and match/foreign key it to data in a DB. The producer of the XML file also provides an XSD...

Seeing the above project reminded me of xsd.exe and that this (and the above project) is something I will have to look very closely at (as I want to be as lazy as possible and don't want to write a bunch of parsing/etc code).

The one concern I have is that sometimes (so I'm told) the XSD may change (depending on project/client needs, etc). So that will need be taken into account (where as my cheese parsing could be made to handle that). Maybe the changes will not be dramatic enough to matter? Maybe I can consume the XSD at runtime and do some dynamic code generation. Maybe I'm being lame and xsd.exe doesn't actually do what I think it does (or need it to do)?

Maybe I just need to shut up and and give it a try.  ;)