I recently had to construct an object hierarchy in order to produce an xml config file for a third party application. A lot of the config file could be constructed from boiler plate xml, so I needed a way to load in sections. The section I wanted to load was for a config element which occurs someway down the heirarchy:
sometag
core
object_definitions
object_type type="myType" plugin="myPlugin"
config
moretags
moretags
moretags
config
object_type
sometag
[Haven't worked out how to escape tags quickly, so I've stripped the brackets]
The following code shows how I created a static method in my config class to load this.
8 ///
9 /// Allows definition of all UI properties
10 ///
11 [Serializable]
12 [XmlRoot("config")]
13 public class ConfigureUIObjectConfig : ObjectConfigBase
14 {
15 public static ConfigureUIObjectConfig LoadUIConfig(string filePath)
16 {
17 System.IO.StreamReader sr=null;
18 ConfigureUIObjectConfig conf;
19 try
20 {
21
22 XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ConfigObjects.ObjectTypes.ConfigureUIObjectConfig));
23
24 sr = new System.IO.StreamReader(filePath);
25 conf = (ConfigureUIObjectConfig)xs.Deserialize(sr);
26 }
27 catch (Exception)
28 {
29 throw;
30 }
31 finally
32 {
33 if (sr!=null)
34 sr.Close();
35 }
36
37 return conf;
38 }
I invoke it from what is normally the root class in my hierarchy in the constructor:
52 public ConfigFile()
53 {
54 //Add default object types
55 ConfigureUIObjectConfig uiConf = new ConfigureUIObjectConfig();
56 ObjectType obj = new ObjectType();
57 //obj.Config = uiConf;
58 obj.Config = ConfigureUIObjectConfig.LoadUIConfig("DefaultUIConfig.xml");//uiConf;
59 obj.Plugin = "UiConfiguratorPlugin";
60 obj.Type = "ConfigureUI";
61 this.Core.ObjectDefinitions.ObjectTypes.Add( obj);
62
63 }
The key to getting this to work is to decorate the
ConfigureUIObjectConfig class with the [
XmlRoot(
"config")] attribute. If you do not do this you will get an exception:
System.InvalidOperationException: <
config xmlns=''> was not expected.
This eluded me at first as I assumed that I could only mark one class with the
XmlRoot attribute, however, it appears that this does not matter in this instance.
