Generating C# code files for B2MML schemas
Recently I was doing some proof-of-concepts for using B2MML messages in my .NET/C# application. I wanted to be able to generate xml-serializable C# classes, compliant to the B2MML xsd schema’s. Since the xsd schema’s are available on the WBF website, I figured I’d simply run those through xsd.exe and start coding away.
However, for some mysterious reason, you are not able to specify the filename of the .cs output file xsd.exe generates. By default it concatenates the names of all the schema’s you pass into it. If you generate a code file for the twenty-or-so schema’s in the B2MML implementation, xsd.exe chooses a filename that is awkward to read and, worse, too large to be handled by my Windows installation.
I found a work-around for this issue on stackoverflow. It appears that there is a known bug in xsd.exe that you can exploit to get a short, readable filename: pass the last schema using the “.” path characters. Now xsd.exe only uses the last schema in the output filename. So I created an empty xsd schema named B2MML-V0401.xsd and ran
xsd B2MML-V0401-AllExtensions.xsd B2MML-V0401-Common.xsd [other schemas go here] .\B2MML-V0401.xsd /c
Which resulted in the file B2MML-V0401.cs.
The resulting C# code is usable in my application, however there are some things that still bother me:
- I don’t really like the code that is generated (amongst other things I’d prefer generic lists over arrays and all code ends up in one huge 30k+ LOC codefile)
- I don’t like the fact that I utilize a known bug in xsd.exe
- The command needs many parameters, which makes it unreadable.
I posted my work-around to the WBF XML newsgroup and got some useful replies to overcome these issues. I’ll investigate those and post my findings here.