If you ever worked on Mobile USSD, you will know that it works exactly like a web request. We have a USSD session manager application (sort of like IIS), because USSD also needs to keep sessions for each time the user comes back with a response. Every USSD service that we add have new requirements and thus normally have a new class to be added as a reference so that the Session manager are aware of the data type it should hold in its session data.

This becomes a problem after a few services because of DLL versioning etc, etc. It became apparent that we needed to store the Class objects in a way that the Session Manager does not need to know what it is. I looked at XML as the answer.

I used a XML Doc to send the Serialized class to this Session manager so that the Session Manager do not need to know what object type it is. I therefor needed to parse these class objects to XML. I wrote these methods to help me with this. The only snag is that it must be well-known object types, like string, int, bool, etc. I started looking at XML attributes, but could not make a generic method for any datatype I can pass to it.

The methods look like this:

        public XmlDocument ParseToXML(ClassObject data)
        {
            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ClassObject ));
            System.Text.StringBuilder doc = new System.Text.StringBuilder();
            TextWriter tw = new StringWriter(doc);
            try
            {
                ser.Serialize(tw, data);
            }
            catch (XmlException ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
            }
            
            tw.Close();
            XmlDocument xmldoc = new XmlDocument();
            xmldoc.LoadXml(doc.ToString());
            return xmldoc;
        }
        public ClassObject FromXML(XmlDocument xmldoc)
        {
            ClassObject data = new ClassObject();
            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ClassObject));
            XmlTextReader xmlreader = new XmlTextReader(xmldoc.OuterXml, XmlNodeType.Document, null);
            
            try
            {
                return (ClassObject)ser.Deserialize(xmlreader);
            }
            catch (Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
                return null;
            }
            finally
            {
                xmlreader.Close();
            }
        }

 The Class Object can look like this:

        public class ClassObject
        {
            private int _property1;
            private int _property2;
            private int _property3;
            private string _property4;
            private ItemIndexer[] _listitemsindex = new ItemIndexer[0];
            public class ItemIndexer
            {
                private int _itemindexprop1;
                private int _itemindexprop2;
                public int ItemIndexProp1
                {
                    get {return _itemindexprop1;}
                    set {_itemindexprop1 = value;}
                }
                public int ItemIndexProp2
                {
                    get {return _itemindexprop2;}
                    set {_itemindexprop2 = value;}
                }            
            }
            
            public ClassObject()
            {
            }
            public int Property1
            {
                get {return _property1;}
                set {_property1 = value;}
            }
            public int Property2
            {
                get {return _property2;}
                set {_property2 = value;}
            }
            public int Property3
            {
                get {return _property3;}
                set {_property3 = value;}
            }
            public string Property4
            {
                get {return _property4;}
                set {_property4 = value;}
            }
            public ItemIndexer[] ItemIndexes
            {
                get    {return _listitemsindex;}
                set {_listitemsindex = value;}
            }
        }

And just by running ParseToXML method, you should get a XMLDoc to send the
OuterXML as a string to save to DB or anywhere else, and get the ClassObject back by running
the FromXML method.

Remember to add 
using System.Xml.Serialization;
in your code.