C#3.0 ToXml Extension Method

I know I stated in my last post I was going to work on extension methods for DateTime. However sometimes you do not know when an idea is going to spark your interest. I have this project where I am building business classes that inherited from a base class which has a method on it to allow the inherited classes to be converted to Xml via the .Net Xml Serialization functionality. As I was working with extensions I had the idea of creating that method as an extension method so it could be used by any data type.

The code is really quite simple. I set the first argument as object, so all types can reference the method. After that it just calls into the XmlSerialization classes to perform the conversion. Code is written C#. The previous post explains how to write extension methods in VB

You will need to add these namespaces.

using System.IO;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

Method Source Code

public static class XmlConvertExtensions
{
 public static string ToXml(this object obj)
  {
  XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(obj.GetType());
  using (StringWriter writer = new StringWriter()) {
   s.Serialize(writer, obj);
   return writer.ToString();
  }
  }
}

Example showing the extension in action:

string input = "hello world";
string xmlData = input.ToXml();

That’s cool, but how can we get it back from Xml? Add this class. It has generic support to convert an Xml string back to a data type.

public class FromXml<T>
{
  public T Convert(string data)
  {
   XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
   using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(data))
   {
    object obj = s.Deserialize(reader);
    return (T)obj;
   }
  }
}

Example showing moving a string to and from Xml.

string input = "hello world";
string xmlData = input.ToXml();
string backFromXml = new FromXml<string>().Convert(xmlData);

Update
Thanks to the comment from Steve for the suggestion of moving the conversion from an Xml string onto the string class as an extension method. It is a much cleaner solution than what I first had.

public static class FromXmlExt
{
  public T FromXml<T>(this string data)
  {
   XmlSerializer s = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
   using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(data))
   {
    object obj = s.Deserialize(reader);
    return (T)obj;
   }
  }
}

Now you can simply do the following:

string input = "hello world";
string xmlData = input.ToXml();
string backFromXml = xmlData.FromXml<string>();

Thanks Steve!