VS2008 – Generate XML Instances

It’s funny how we take things for granted. As Biztalk developers, we get used to the idea of being able to right click on a schema and generate an instance . In non Biztalk projects however, this couldnt be done. Till now.

I was playing around with writing some XML Instance Generation for MockingBird to finish off the next release and spent a lot of time poking around the Schema Object Model etc. While doing that, I quite accidentally opened the XML Schema Explorer tool window. Now I had seen that in the past and navigated through some types etc (and thinking it was just a simple add-on to the old VS i kind of took it for granted and didnt investigate further). 

What I did not realize is that for Elements, you can generate sample instances.  Check out the following screenshot.

Generate Sample XML

As you can see from the tree behind the popup window, elements are colored differently as well.

This is a great time-saver. I think this can be done only in VS2008 SP1.

Unfortunately, the downside is that there is no API into this tool-window (or rather, the library behind it), so we cannot programmatically generate instances in bulk. Also it will not open WSDL files, so you have to extract the XSD from the WSDL (if not already available separately) in order to work with this tool window. But i think its cool as we no longer have to depend on third party XML editors to get sample instances.

By the way, if you are looking for help in this area (of instance generation) , there is some sample code available in the MSDN article, Generating XML Documents from Schemas which is quite well written. While there are license restrictions on modification/ derivation (and then redistribution), plain redistribution without modification, I gather, is permitted, so the easiest thing for MockingBird would be to just redistribute the binaries of that sample with the GUI. No sense in reinventing the wheel.

In terms of the Biztalk Schema Editor and its instance generation, if any Biztalk folks know if there’s a programmatic way of doing that, please let me know  (Update: I mean specifically for 2006 and R2). I did a lot of digging around in the Developer Tools folder for an assembly that would allow it, but all the classes were internal. I did come across one public class finally (dont remember the assembly off the top of my head now), which had a public method but required some interface to be passed in but didnt work when i tried calling it from custom code. It would be useful to do this programmatically so we can generate instances in bulk for  a given set of schemas (useful when updating instances to correspond to schema changes etc). So, if you’ve managed to do this and are happy to share info then drop me a line.