Why is XML?

Chris Maunder

Just why. I spent an hour fighting with XmlSerialisers to try and get my object mapped to a schema. Changing names, trying to get attributes setup, dealing with CDATA. I gave up. I got so fed up I simply wrote the XML directly as a raw string. If I could have kicked it I would have kicked it. I totally get the beauty of having data in a class and throwing it at different serialisers and having it Just Work. Switch between XML and Json and maybe binary and text and build out this whole massive ecosystem that screams "I'm trying to do too much!". But dear lord. It's like root canal surgery. Is anyone actively using XML as a data transport format? I get that we all use it in things like XAML and ASP.NET pages and the whole HTML thing, but as something that is not seen or edited by humans, that needs to be cognizant of bandwidth, is it still being used in that manner or am I just really, really intolerant this morning?

cheers Chris Maunder

raddevus

I had the same issues. The C# XML API has never made sense to me. I used Xerces (old Apache) and have done a bit of work with parsing XML into a DOM and it is always painful. It all feels so manual. I finally wrote a program that: 1) takes any valid XML and turns it into C# classes. (attributes become properties of the classes, etc) 2) Once you load the classes into your project you can just interact with the classes and then when it is done, you can call serialize and and save the XML with the new values to your XML out file. Would this help you? The code is very short. I created an XML Class Generator tool. I can provide the code if you like, just tell me how to get it to you. Basically you will 1) start my C# generator program (Winform) 2) point it at an xml file 3) provide a namespace for your C# class 4) generate the class. 5) incorporate the new class file into your project 6) It will read your XML with values into your project when you point it at your xml file. That means you can now interact with C# code and update values on your XML. EDIT I'll put the code out on Github and give you a link so you can try it.

Marc Clifton

I had the same problem just a couple days ago. I ended up throwing the XML into this[^] and it generated the C# code which worked perfectly and showed me what I was doing wrong. ;)

Chris Maunder wrote:

s anyone actively using XML as a data transport format?

Sadly, yes. Lots of legacy systems or old API's that never got updated to JSON. :(

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raddevus

Here's the github project. This Visual Studio project is quite old and there are some weird ideas in there, because generating classes is a bit odd. But, it should all be straight forward --- though ugly code. GitHub - raddevus/XmlClassGenerator: Generates C# classes from XML file. Classes can be pulled into project and mapped so you can serialize your data back to original XML.[^]

Forogar

oooh! That is SO useful - thanks for the link, Marc!

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

Forogar

It looks pretty good - ReSharper is going nuts on it but who cares!

- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.

OriginalGriff

Thanks for that - I use these for JSON, but I've not had an XML version before: JSON Utils: Generate C#, VB.Net, SQL Table, Java and PHP from JSON[^] Convert JSON to C# Classes Online - Json2CSharp Toolkit[^] Mostly because I'm not fond of XML ... come to think of it, I'm not fond of HTML either. :-D

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Nelek

THANK YOU A LOT :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.

glennPattonWork3

Dang, what did Raddius say or do, he is trusted member of :bob:'s court.

Gary R Wheeler

I've found that .NET XML serialization works fine and is relatively simple as long as .NET is doing the round-tripping. I've occasionally had to write my own serializers, but that's usually fairly trivial. Adapting it to an existing schema or otherwise-specified form is a PITA. Instead of being able to say "handle this in XML", you essentially have to write code that implements the schema. This of course sucks, because the schema changes all the time (trust me, it's in the rules). You only get basic parsing out of the .NET XML support if you go this route.

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Slacker007

Marc Clifton wrote:

Lots of legacy systems or old API's that never got updated to JSON.

Exactly.

Slacker007

perhaps he tried to delete the post, and the system made the message closed because others responded? I thought it weird as well.

Rick York

It appears he posted a link to something that is verbotten.

"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"

realJSOP

This article may help: Rudimentary ViewModel Class Generator[^] It deals specifically with entities from xml

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fd9750

Some guy somewhere had a bad dream and woke up with the idea: now how can I make something totally confusing and complicated which computers can read effortlessly but humans will find totally incomprehensible? He came up with XML and ticked all the necessary boxes/requirements perfectly. Personally I am not a fan of javascript but boy did they get that JSON stuff right. Whatever programming language you care to use the JSON data exchange is dead easy to follow and debug. Leave the hard interpreting stuff to computers, not humans. For god's sake: that is why we designed them for !!!

Chris Maunder

That's what killed me: I have a working implementation in Json but needed (evidently) to have it work in XML too. Json: it just worked. Next? XML: my life is a miserable series of pointless failures

cheers Chris Maunder

KarstenK

The XML-hype is history. try json it is smaller, better readable and a lot of parsers can handle it.

Press F1 for help or google it. Greetings from Germany

Greg Utas

I never had to suffer through this kind of pain. I mostly worked on a system that was originally developed when memory and CPU time couldn't be frittered away on messages the size of _.jpg_s. Our proprietary language prefixed pack(n) to the type to control a field's width, and it was easy to predict how it would lay out a struct. Developing everything in the same language and standardizing on endianism made it possible to read/write structs directly from/to messages that used TLV encoding (type=parameter id, length=bytes, value=struct, nested if necessary). Very efficient, and no serialization or deserialization. But processors were upgraded independently, so an interprocessor protocol had to remain backward compatible. In rare cases, this meant that an adapter in release n+k had to convert a message received from a processor still running release n.

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kmoorevs

Chris Maunder wrote:

Is anyone actively using XML as a data transport format?

Gosh yes, in a number of ways: 0: storing encrypted ftp credentials for desktop apps (yep, right out in the open on a web server) they get changed annually or as needed. 1: advertising program updates for desktop apps 2: uploading client data from desktop apps to a ftp/web server for processing, then maybe reporting 3: downloading client data from web apps to desktop apps (sql server 'for xml' is great) the xml loads directly into a datatable...life is good. Of course, it helps when you control both ends (creation and consumption) of the xml content. :)

"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse "Hope is contagious"

trønderen

I see XML (and even more: HTML) as a binary format. Not suitable for human consumption. XML is OK for something generated as a binary serialization, untouched by human hands. Evaluated as such, XML qualities are mediocre. I cannot imagine any binary Tag-Length-Value format worse than XML, by any standard. XML has a single force: You can edit it using vi! (Or for that sake: cat 0 > filename :-)) Not too long ago, I asked (in General Programming) for reactions to my proposal of have a friend of mine provide a lot of tabular data as Excel tables, rather than vi editable files. That was more or less universally condemned: Either, he should provide data as a vi editable text file - in the class of XML, CSV, YAML, JSON ... - or I should develop a tailor-made domain-specific data entry application, doing a complete validation of all input data. Thinking that an Excel sheet might contribute to validation, whatever checks were added, was just naive and worthless. I accept the arguments for a data entry application, as long as we recognize that text based binary formats such as XML, CSV, YAML, and JSON, are unfit for human consumption. They are binary: You have to be concerned about the representation, with regard to use of special characters, quoting, length restrictions, ... The contents isn't free. So, let's make data entry applications that are free. How easy is that, with XML, CSV, YAML or JSON as the user level data entry format? Once we have come that far: Why not use a truly binary format, most likely TLV based? If you admit that the user should never edit the file directly, neither with vi nor cat 0 > file, what is then the advantage of using XML, HTML, CSV, YAML, JSON, ... ? If anyone insists on obtaining the information in an "editable" format, generating it from a binary TLV representation is usually quite trivial. For the applications I manage, I can easily provide stored information in either "editable" format, or even (to some degree) accept input in those formats. Yet, any "editable" format is secondary. Simple tree structures, those that you can easily edit using vi (or cat 0 > filename) are easily handled, but if the data structures require cross-linking, you may need to use a some domain dependent data entry (or data manipulation) tool. You just can't handle complex structures neither in XML, YAML nor JSON; they have to be managed with specialized tools. The essential point for this discussion: XML, as well as other "editable" formats, is