Traversing an arbitrary C# object graph using XPath/applying XSL transforms

Question

I\'ve been looking for a component that would allow me to pass an arbitrary C# object to an XSL transform.

The naive way of doing this is to serialise the object gra

Answer 1

Since the object graph may be cyclic, you cannot possibly make a Tree-based structure out of it. Your best bet is to represent the object graph by it's simplest components: nodes and vectors.

More specifically, make each node (object) an element with a unique ID (perhaps provided by C#'s GetHashCode() method?). References to other objects (vectors) would be handled by referencing the ID of the object.

Example classes (note that I don't know C# so my syntax may be a bit off):

public class SomeType {
   public int myInt  { get; set; }
}

public class AnotherType {
   public string myString { get; set; }
   public SomeType mySomeType { get; set; }
}

public class LastType {
   public SomeType mySomeType { get; set; }
   public AnotherType myAnotherType { get; set; }
}

public class UserTypes{
    static void Main()
    {
        LastType lt = new LastType();
        SomeType st = new SomeType();
        AnotherType atype = new AnotherType();

        st.myInt = 7;
        atype.myString = "BOB";
        atype.mySomeType = st;
        lt.mySomeType = st;
        lt.myAnotherType = atype;

        string xmlOutput = YourAwesomeFunction(lt);
    }
}

Then we would expect the value of xmlOutput to be something like this (note that the ID values chosen are completely synthetic):

 
   
   
 

 
  7
 

 
  BOB