Serializing and DeSerializing XML Objects in .Net

these two simple extension methods with have you switching between XML and objects in no time

First off, it is pretty well known that if you have any Object and want to convert it into an XML strong, you can use the XmlSerializer to do so. I encapsulated the process is a simple extension method that run from any object - this will work as long as the object has a constructor with no inputs (ie: new SomeObject()) as that is the constraint passed up from XmlSerializer. Here is the method for converting from an object to an xml string:

public static string ToXmlString(this Object o)
{
    StringWriter xml = new 
        StringWriter(new StringBuilder());
    XmlSerializer xS = new XmlSerializer(o.GetType());
    xS.Serialize(xml, o);
    return xml.ToString();
}

With this, now all you need to do is:

MyObject obj = new MyObject();
// a bunch of stuff here...
// now I want the xml representation of this:
string xml = obj.ToXmlString();

Now to go backwards, you can use the similar Deserialize along with the XmlSerializer with this method:

public static T XmlToObject<T>(this string s)
{
    var xR = XmlReader.Create(new 
        StringReader(s));
    XmlSerializer xS = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T)); 
    T obj = (T)xS.Deserialize(xR);
    return obj;
}

It is important to notice that this is taking in a raw xml string, which would not be web safe. If you were taking in data from a web source, you would want to employ HttpUtility.UrlDecode(s) instead of just s above. Now if you want to turn your above string 'xml' into an object again, simply call it like this:

MyObject obj2 = xml.XmlToObject<SomeObject>();