CodeSynthesis XSD Data Binding

Nowadays I make a habit of writing up how to use particular tools or techniques for anything which might be useful to reference later. Many techniques I worked on before starting this practice are now lost to me, locked away in proprietary source code at some previous employer.

This post concerns data binding from XML schemas in C++, generating classes rather than manipulating the underlying XML. As its written for Future Me, it might not be so interesting to those who are not Future Me.

Consider the simple XML schema shown below. I aspire to be the Evil Overlord, and am working on the HR system to keep track of my innumerable minions.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">

<xs:element name="minion">
  <xs:complexType>
    <xs:sequence>
      <xs:element name="name" type="xs:string"/>
      <xs:element name="rank" type="xs:string"/>
      <xs:element name="serial" type="xs:positiveInteger"/>
    </xs:sequence>
    <xs:attribute name="loyalty" type="xs:float" use="required"/>
  </xs:complexType>
</xs:element>

</xs:schema>

It would be possible to parse documents created from this schema manually, using something like libexpat or Xerces. Unfortunately as the schema becomes large, the likelihood of mistakes in this manual process becomes overwhelming.

I chose instead to work with CodeSynthesis XSD to generate classes from the schema, based mainly on the Free/Libre Open Source Software Exception in their license. This project will eventually be released under an Apache-style license, and all other data binding solutions I found for C++ were either GPL or a commercial license.

 
Parsing from XML

The generated code provides a number of function prototypes to parse XML from various sources, including iostreams.

std::istringstream agent_smith(
  "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\" standalone=\"no\" ?>"
  "<minion xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" "
  "xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation=\"schema.xsd\" loyalty=\"0.2\">"
  "<name>Agent Smith</name>"
  "<rank>Member of Minion Staff</rank>"
  "<serial>2</serial>"
  "</minion>");
std::auto_ptr m(NULL);

try {
  m = minion_(agent_smith);
} catch (const xml_schema::exception& e) {
  std::cerr << e << std::endl;
  return;
}

The minion object now contains data members with proper C++ types for each XML node and attribute.

std::cout << "Name: " << m->name() << std::endl
          << "Loyalty: " << m->loyalty() << std::endl
          << "Rank: " << m->rank() << std::endl
          << "Serial number: " << m->serial() << std::endl;

 
Serialization to XML

Methods to serialize an object to XML are not generated by default, the --generate-serialization flag has to be passed to xsdcxx. This emits another series of minion_ methods, which take output arguments.

int main() {
  minion m("Salacious Crumb", "Senior Lackey", 1, 0.9);
  minion_(std::cout, m);
}

This sends the XML to stdout.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no" ?>
<minion loyalty="0.9">
  <name>Salacious Crumb</name>
  <rank>Senior Lackey</rank>
  <serial>1</serial>
</minion>

Codesynthesis relies on Xerces-C++ to provide the lower layer XML handling, so all of the functionality of that library is also available to the application.

Thats enough for now. See you later, Future Me.