Converting a DTD / XSD to strongly typed C# class

We are looking to implement some CyberSource Reporting functions that our system will be able to poll CyberSource for various reports, and call different actions base on the result. After going through the documentations, we know the CyberSource portals are providing us the DTD definitions.

Prerequisite

• CyberSource Reporting Developer Guide
• XSD.exe
• DTD

Implementation

Firstly we will need to download the DTD from the CyberSource portal.

We want to generate the strongly typed model class from the DTD definition, but we will need to convert this into XSD first. This can be done the XML Create Schema function via Visual Studio.

We are now able to generate the C# class by using the XSD.exe. It is available via the Visual Studio Developer Command Prompt.

The generated file will look something like this.

Troubleshooting

[System.InvalidOperationException]: {"<xxx xmlns='some_uri'> was not expected."}

During developments, we got an exception of "There is an error in XML document (0, 0)." and the inner exception is "<Report xmlns='https://ebctest.cybersource.com/ebctest/reports/dtd/cdr.dtd'> was not expected."

This is due to the DTD that we downloaded had a namespace of vendor's live site, therefore our strongly typed class has a name space of the live URI too. However when we are connected to their sandbox, throws an exception as the namespace didn't match.

One approach would be dynamically changing the namespace according to our connections, but I chose an easier way.

Firstly, I removed the namespace from the System.Xml.Serialization Xml Attributes in our generated strongly typed object class.

We will also need to remove the namespace from the incoming xml before we do any deserialization. This can be achieved by creating an extension method to recursively remove all namespaces from all nodes.

private ConversionDetailReport GetConversionDetailReport(string xmlString)
{
    var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ConversionDetailReport));

    var xDoc = XDocument.Parse(xmlString);

    var xr = xDoc.Root.RemoveAllNamespaces().CreateReader();

    return (ConversionDetailReport)serializer.Deserialize(xr);
}