How to map XML file content to C# object(s)

Question

I am new to C# and I am trying to read an XML file and transfer its contents to C# object(s).

e.g. An example XML file could be:

<people>
    <person>
        <name>Person 1</name>
        <age>21</age>
    </person>
    <person>
        <name>Person 2</name>
        <age>22</age>
    </person>
</people>

.. could be mapped to an array of C# class called 'Person':

Person[] people;

Where a Person object could contain the following fields:

string name;
uint age;

Answer 1

It sounds like you want use XML serialization. There is a lot already out there, but this is a pretty simple example. http://www.switchonthecode.com/tutorials/csharp-tutorial-xml-serialization

The snippet you want is about 1/4 of the way down:

XmlSerializer deserializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(List<Movie>));
TextReader textReader = new StreamReader(@"C:\movie.xml");
List<Movie> movies; 
movies = (List<Movie>)deserializer.Deserialize(textReader);
textReader.Close();

Hopefully, this helps

Answer 2

You can use the XmlSerializer class to serialize CLR Objects into XML. Here is the MSDN documentation with some sample code : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.serialization.xmlserializer.aspx