I could use a little guidance on working with XML.
I'm working on a several XML interop specifications which will be used to create or update data in our system. I'd like to provide a way for my customers to specify which elements they want to maintain via automation using the XML spec vs. manually updating the records after the fact. The quick back story to this is that our customers have upstream applications that can supply some but typically not all of the data required by our application so they will typically be sending us partial information for a record and then maintaining the rest in our app.
So assuming a simple XML:
<Data>
<Element1 />
<Element2 />
<Element3 />
</Data>
Customer A may supply element 1 and 2 but not element 3 so they would want to configure 3 to persist values between updates but for 1 and 2 to always overwrite with the new value.
Customer B may supply element 1, 2 and 3 and want to configure to always overwrite all 3 elements.
So I guess what I'm really looking for with Customer A is something like this:
<Data>
<Element1>data1</Element1>
<Element2>data2</Element2>
<Element3 overwriteExistingData="false"></Element3>
</Data>
I understand XML to a degree but have found it very easy to create an XML schema by simply creating C# class, doing some decorating with attributes if necessary and then generating a schema with xsd.exe and calling it a day.
Things that I'm unsure of are - how to distinguish between a null value and something that the customer didn't have a value for - the best way to handle these partial data situations where I'm not going to get a complete replacement record for every update.
I'm sure I am missing the boat to some degree but I really like the simplicity of having a class definition and telling the customer to give me XML that allows me to just type one line of code to deserialize the XML into my C# object.
Any guidance would be much appreciated
