XmlGridReader

A library to simplify deserializing data tables from XML.

No need to manually traverse the DOM and project results using LINQ to XML, or be limited by the constraints of XmlSerializer (classes must be public, and have parameterless constructor).

How to use it

Given the following XML:

<Data>
  <Book>
    <Title>Anna Karenina</Title>
    <PublicationDate>1878-03-27</PublicationDate>
    <NumberOfPages>864</NumberOfPages>
  </Book>
  <Book>
    <Title>To Kill a Mockingbird</Title>
    <PublicationDate>1960-07-11</PublicationDate>
    <NumberOfPages>281</NumberOfPages>
  </Book>
</Data>

And a DTO:

public class Book
{
    public string Title { get; set; }

    public DateTime PublicationDate { get; set; }

    public int NumberOfPages { get; set; }
}

Simply deserialize the XML into a collection of DTOs:

IEnumerable<Book> books = Reader.Read<Book>(xml);

Why did I create XmlGridReader?

I needed to migrate some data access code from using SQL to using a web API that returned table-like data in XML. The original SQL code used Dapper, and I wanted to keep the benefits of a simple convention-based deserializer.

The web API and the XML it returns has some idiosyncrasies, which have influenced the design of this library.

Limitations

If the type argument of Read<T>(string) is a class (excluding string), the data will either be mapped to the class' public settable properties, or to the class' single non-parameterless constructor. The 'columns' in the data must match the order of parameters or properties in the target.

Empty/null cells must be represented as empty elements i.e. <element></element>, not omitted or with the xsi:nil attribute.

Benchmarks

BenchmarkDotNet=v0.12.1, OS=macOS Catalina 10.15.7 (19H2) [Darwin 19.6.0]
Intel Core i5-1038NG7 CPU 2.00GHz, 1 CPU, 8 logical and 4 physical cores
.NET Core SDK=5.0.100
  [Host]     : .NET Core 3.1.10 (CoreCLR 4.700.20.51601, CoreFX 4.700.20.51901), X64 RyuJIT
  DefaultJob : .NET Core 3.1.10 (CoreCLR 4.700.20.51601, CoreFX 4.700.20.51901), X64 RyuJIT

Method	NumberOfRecords	Mean	Error	StdDev	Median	Ratio	RatioSD	Rank
XmlSerializer	1000	1.784 ms	0.0351 ms	0.0651 ms	1.762 ms	1.00	0.00	2
LinqToXml	1000	2.010 ms	0.0390 ms	0.0478 ms	2.005 ms	1.11	0.05	3
XmlReader	1000	1.132 ms	0.0270 ms	0.0789 ms	1.135 ms	0.65	0.05	1
XmlGridReader_Properties	1000	2.718 ms	0.0760 ms	0.2204 ms	2.743 ms	1.54	0.12	4
XmlGridReader_Constructor	1000	2.630 ms	0.0666 ms	0.1964 ms	2.577 ms	1.56	0.10	4