First observation: using the object graph is not the best place to start to generate a dot representation. You're talking about nodes which have names and are in a well-defined hierarchy and you want to produce some kind of dot notation from it; the xml DOM seems to be the best place to do this.
There are a few problems with the way you describe the problem.
The first is in the strategy when it comes to handling multiple elements of the same name. You've dodged the problem in your example by making that dictionary value actually a list, but suppose your xml looked like this:
<rootNode>
<foo enabled="true">
<bar enabled="false" myAttribute="5.6" />
<bar enabled="true" myAttribute="3.4" />
</foo>
</rootNode>
Besides foo.enabled = (Boolean)true
which should be fairly obvious, what dictionary keys do you propose for the two myAttribute
leaves? Or would you have a single entry, foo.bar.myAttribute = List<float> {5.6, 3.4}
? So, problem #1, there's no unambiguous way to deal with multiple similarly-named non-leaf nodes.
The second problem is in selecting a data type to do the final conversion at leaf nodes (i.e. attribute or element values). If you're writing to a Dictionary<string, object>
, you will probably want to select a type based on the Schema simple type of the element/attribute being read. I don't know how to do that, but suggest looking up the various uses of the System.Convert
class.
Assuming for the moment that problem #1 won't surface, and that you're ok with a Dictionary<string, string>
implementation, here's some code to get you started:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
var xml = @"
<rootNode>
<foo enabled=""true"">
<bar enabled=""false"" myAttribute=""5.6"" />
<baz>Text!</baz>
</foo>
</rootNode>
";
var document = new XmlDocument();
document.LoadXml(xml);
var retVal = new Dictionary<string, string>();
Go(retVal, document.DocumentElement, new List<string>());
}
private static void Go(Dictionary<string, string> theDict, XmlElement start, List<string> keyTokens)
{
// Process simple content
var textNode = start.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlText>().SingleOrDefault();
if (textNode != null)
{
theDict[string.Join(".", keyTokens.ToArray())] = textNode.Value;
}
// Process attributes
foreach (XmlAttribute att in start.Attributes)
{
theDict[string.Join(".", keyTokens.ToArray()) + "." + att.Name] = att.Value;
}
// Process child nodes
foreach (var childNode in start.ChildNodes.OfType<XmlElement>())
{
Go(theDict, childNode, new List<string>(keyTokens) { childNode.Name }); // shorthand for .Add
}
}
And here's the result: