XML serialization - complex type to c# class

Question

I serialize XML files to objects. Let's not talk about how I serialize it as it's not the problem. The problem is how to build a class for complex type elements. For normal XML elements, I do it follows (using System.Xml.Serialization of course)

public class Item
{
    [XmlElement("thumbnail")]
    public string thumbnail { get; set; }
}

All works good. But for a complex type, I don't know how to represent it in a class, I tried to represent it by an array like this

public class Item
{
    [XmlArray("thumbnail")]

    [XmlArrayItem("url")]
    public string url { get; set; }

    [XmlArrayItem("width")]
    public string width { get; set; }

    [XmlArrayItem("height")]
    public string height { get; set; }

    public string[] thumbnail { get; set; }
 }

but this didn't work.

any ideas how to represent an XML complex element in a C# class?

Show us the schema and we can help. However the .NET framework/VS SDK comes with a command line tool xsd.exe that can take a schema file schema.xsd and generate C# (or VB) classes from it so you could simply use that tool to generate your classes or at least to have a sample to start with: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/x6c1kb0s%28v=vs.110%29.aspx — Martin Honnen
– Martin Honnen, Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 12:55
Thanks for your replies. I edited the post to include the XML file. I know about xsd.exe and I can use that for this purpose but as I have a project running in the tags way I need to do it in the same way. Thanks! — RonaDona
– RonaDona, Commented Jun 2, 2013 at 13:11

Peter T. LaComb Jr. · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-02 14:14:25Z

1

You should have an Item class, and a Thumbnail class, more like this:

public class item {
    [XmlElement("thumbnail")]
    public thumbnail thumbnail {get;set;}
}

public class thumbnail
{
    [XmlElement("url")]
    public string url { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("width")]
    public string width { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("height")]
    public string height { get; set; }
 }

edited Jun 2, 2013 at 14:14

answered Jun 2, 2013 at 14:07

Peter T. LaComb Jr.

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