Develop Reference

Generate class from XSD - compact solution

I have XSD file, which seems rather complex (I am very new to working with XSD).
My task is to create a program, which would generate XML files based on the XSD schema (in a more detail - we will get a CSV file with the data and these need to be serialized into a XML). I did a research and tried various techniques of generating C# class from the XSD file, where the most 'compact' was xsd2code plugin for Visual Studio.
Nonetheless, this plugin has generated over 7,000 lines of code which quite shocked me as it was just one giant mess (for me).
My question now is - is there a better way (or maybe some switch I forgot to check) which will generate rather compact C# class? If not, then what is the next step that people have to do once they get C# class? Do they have to additional manual post processing so that the file is more 'programmer-friendly', or ...?
Thank you for your guidance; any help or tip will be highly appreciated!

Manipulating a Python file from C#

I'm working on some tools for a game I'm making. The tools serve as a front end to making editing game files easier. Several of the files are python scripting files. For instance, I have an Items.py file that contains the following (minimalized for example)
from ItemModule import *
import copy
class ScriptedItem(Item):
def __init__(self, name, description, itemtypes, primarytype, flags, usability, value, throwpower):
Item.__init__(self, name, description, itemtypes, primarytype, flags, usability, value, throwpower, Item.GetNextItemID())
def Clone(self):
return copy.deepcopy(self)
ItemLibrary.AddItem(ScriptedItem("Abounding Crystal", "A colourful crystal composed of many smaller crystals. It gives off a warm glow.", ItemType.SynthesisMaterial, ItemType.SynthesisMaterial, 0, ItemUsage.Unusable, 0, 50))
As I Mentioned, I want to provide a front end for editing this file without requring an editor to know python/edit the file directly. My editor needs to be able to:
Find and list all the class types (in this example, it'd be only
Scripted Item)
Find and list all created items (in this case there'd only be one,
Abounding Crystal). I'd need to find the type (in this
caseScriptedItem) and all the parameter values
Allow editing of parameters and the creation/removal of items.
To do this, I started writing my own parser, looking for the class keyword and when these recorded classes are use to construct objects. This worked for simple data, but when I started using classes with complex constructors (lists, maps, etc.) it became increasing difficult to correctly parse.
After searching around, I found IronPython made it easy to parse python files, so that's what I went about doing. Once I built the Abstract Syntax Tree I used PythonWalkers to identify and find all the information I need. This works perfectly for reading in data, but I don't see an easy way to push updated data into the Python file. As far as I can tell, there's no way to change the values in the AST and much less so to convert the AST back into a script file. If I'm wrong, I'd love for someone to tell me how I could do this. What I'd need to do now is search through the file until I find the correctly line, then try to push the data into the constructor, ensuring correct ordering.
Is there some obvious solution I'm not seeing? Should I just keeping working on my parser and make it support more complex data types? I really though I had it with the IronPython parser, but I didn't think about how tricky it'd be to push modified data back into the file.
Any suggestions would be appreciated

You want a source-to-source program transformation tool.
Such a tool parses a language to an internal data structure (invariably an AST), allows you to modify the AST, and then can regenerate source text from the modified AST without changing essentially anything about the source except where the AST changes were made.
Such a program transformation tool has to parse text to ASTs, and "anti-parse" (called "Prettyprint") ASTs to text. If IronPython has a prettyprinter, that's what you need.
If it doesn't, you can build one with some (maybe a lot) of effort; as you've observed,
this isn't as easy as one might think. See my answer
Compiling an AST back to source code
If that doesn't work, our DMS Software Reengineering Toolkit with its Python front end might do the trick. It has all the above properties.

Provided you can find a complete and up-to-date context free grammar file for Python, you could use CoCo/R parser generator to generate a python parser in C#.
You can add production code to the grammar file itself to populate a data structure in your C# app. Said data structure can hold all the information you need (methods and their arguments, properties, constructors, destructors etc). Once you have this data structure, its just a task of designing a front end for the user and representing this data structure in a way that makes it editable to them (this is more of a design task than a complicated programming task).
Finally, iterate through you data structure and write out a .py file.

You can use the python inspect module to print the source of an object. In your case: To print the source of your module - the file you just parsed with IronPython. I haven't checked to see if inspect works with IronPython yet, though.
As to adding stuff, well, it's a module, right? You can just add stuff to a module... I'd load the module and then alter it, use inspect to view print it and save to disk.
From your post, it looks like you're already deep in the trenches and having fun, so I'd be really happy to see a post here on how you solved this problem!

To me it sounds more like you are at the point where you shove it all into a sqlite database and start editing it that way. Hooking up some forms to edit tables is simpler for the UI. At that point you generate new python files by dumping your tables out with some formatting to provide the surrounding python scripts.
SVN / Git / whatever can merge the updated changes via the python files.
This is what I ended up doing for my project at any rate. I started using python to hook up the various items using their computed keys and then just added some forms UI to avoid editing mistakes in the python files.

C# Class (source code) Generator from XML file

What tools have you used to create class source code from xml files? Is this an edge case that I need to roll my own? I have need to create DTOs from some XML files, but the XML files are subject to change (add/remove attributes) so I need to be able to quickly update them.
I'm reallly not impressed with the .xml -> .xsd -> bloated .cs approach, and was looking for something to hopefully generate simple POCOs for me. Are there any tools you've used or seen that do this?

There is a built-in way to do this in VS2008 and later, T4. Hanselman has a bunch of great links in one place.

How about Xsd2Code:
http://xsd2code.codeplex.com/

T4 sounds perfect for this.
It's essentially an ASP.NET like syntax to generate code based on your template.
You would write the template to output the code for the POCO as needed, and then embed code in the template to iterate over your XML collection.
T4 is part of Visual Studio 2008 (but undocumented), and 2010. The Microsoft DSL tools gives support for T4 for Visual Studio 2005 as a separate download.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb126445.aspx

I realise that this is a rather old post and you have probably moved on.
But I had the same problem as you so I decided to write my own program.
It is in no way elegant but it did the job for me.
You can get it here: Please make suggestions if you like it.
SimpleXmlToCode

C# How to generate code from code

Is it possible to generate and build some c# code based on the code from the same project. I tried with T4 and Reflection, but there are some assembly locking issues. Is there any other way?

Reflection works fine for me. You can get around assembly locking issues by isolating your build task to a separate AppDomain within VS. When the task completes, any assemblies you need to use for code generation will be unloaded together with the task's AppDomain. See AppDomainIsolatedTask.

You can definitely write your own code generator, all in C# - after all, "code" that's being generated is just a text file you write out.
But what's wrong with T4 templates? They offer a lot of functionality that you don't have to reinvent yet again - why not use it? Can you tell us in more detail what problems you're having with T4?
T4 is really just a bunch of classes in .NET, too - so you could definitely write your own code generator handling some of the logic, and use T4 to do the templating & replacing those template values part. But again: in order to help you diagnose your T4 problems, we'd need to know more about those....

This example from Oleg Sych uses FXCop's introspection engine instead of reflection. That way, the assemblies do not get locked.
Unfortunately, Reflection is optimized
for code execution. One particular
limitation makes it ill-suited for
code generation - an assembly loaded
using Reflection can only be unloaded
with its AppDomain. Because T4
templates are compiled into .NET
assemblies and cached to improve
performance of code generation, using
Reflection to access the component
assembly causes T4 to lock it.
Alternatively, if you're only targeting Linq to SQL classes, you could generate code from the dbml file instead of the code that L2S generates from the dbml. I've got an example of something similar (an edmx file) on my own blog.

There is a third party C# .NET variant of JavaCC that we use at work.
Also an interesting article about how to make one:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc136756.aspx

It really depends on what exactly are you trying to achieve, but on a general case I'd recommend using T4 templates.
And yes, it is possible to use T4 templates inside your project to generate code in your project based on some local settings, but you should define what are you trying to do.
If you want to generate code based on some classes that you define in the same project - this doesn't sound like something easily achievable (after all you want to compile some of the classes in the current project, generate some code based on them and after that generate classes again... umm.. ?)
But if you want to store some settings and then run the T4 template and generate some code based on these settings - this is easily achievable. T4MVC is an example (they generate code based on a settings file that is copied and stored in the project alongside the T4 template). This template also looks at the current files available in the solution, and generates string constants based on each file. That kind of sounds like it would really help you with your problem, whatever it is :)
If you're still unsure - you can specify more details about what you want to do, and we'll try to help you :)

How to get all file attributes including author, title, mp3 tags, etc, in one sweep

I would like to write all meta data (including advanced summary properties) for my files in a windows folder to a csv file. Is there a way to collect all the attributes? I see mp3 files have a different set of attributes compared to jpg files. (c#)
This can also be a script (vb, perl)
Update: by looking at libextractor (thank you) I can see this can be achieved by writing different plugins for different type of files. I gather this meta data is not a simple collection...

In Perl, you can use MP3::Tag or MP3::Info

If you can cope w/ VB.Net: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/vb/mp3id3v1.aspx
If you can cope w/ C++/.Net: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/audio-video/mp3fileinfo.aspx
For either (assuming the C++) is compiled to .Net, you can use Reflector to disassemble the binary and convert it to C#. Check w/ the respective authors about their licenses first (usually Code Project articles are under an open license like CPOL).

In a library? Try libextractor if your software is GPL.

Ok, after the clarification edits, I would suggest looking at the introspection available in .Net. I will warn you however that I think you will get more satisfying results if you forgo introspection and define the specific properties that you want for the file types that you expect to see.
Since scripting is valid, then if this were my problem to solve I would use Powershell since the .net introspection is baked in.

It may not be worth it to add all of the data from a jpeg file (exif data). I would hand pick what attributes I wanted from those files.