What is the best way to read and write cXML documents in C#?

Question

I know this is a vague open ended question. I'm hoping to get some general direction.

I need to add cXML punchout to an ASP.NET C# site / application. This is replacing something that I wrote years ago in ColdFusion.

I'm a reasonably experienced C# developer but I haven't done much with XML. There seems to be lots of different options for processing XML in .NET.

Here's the open ended question: Assuming that I have an XML document in some form, eg a file or a string, what is the best way to read it into my code? I want to get the data and then query databases etc. The cXML document size and our traffic volumes are easily small enough so that loading the a cXML document into memory is not a problem.

Should I:

1) Manually build classes based on the dtd and use the XML Serializer?

2) Use a tool to generate classes. There are sample cXML files downloadable from Ariba.com. I tried xsd.exe to generate an xsd and then xsd.exe /c to generate classes. When I try to deserialize I get errors because there seems to be "confusion" around whether some elements should be single values or arrays.

I tried the CodeXS online tool but that gives errors in it's log and errors if I try to deserialize a sample document.

2) Create a dataset and ReadXml()?

3) Create a typed dataset and ReadXml()?

4) Use Linq to XML. I often use Linq to Objects so I'm familiar with Linq in general but I'm struggling to see what it gives me in this situation.

5) Some other means.

I guess I need to improve my understanding of XML in general but even so ... am I missing some obvious way of doing this? In the old ColdFusion site I found a free component ("tag") which basically ignored any schema and read the XML into a "structure" which is essentially a series of nested hash tables which was then easy to read in code. That was probably quite sloppy but it worked.

I also need to generate XML files from my C# objects. Maybe Linq to XML will be good for that. I could start with a default "template" document and manipulate it before saving.

Thanks for any pointers ...

Answer 1

If you need to generate arbitrary XML in an exact format, you should generate it manually using LINQ-to-XML.