We require the ability to generate C++ classes from XML (akin to JAXB in Java) but for commercial reasons do not wish to use CodeSynthesisXSD. Are there any other libraries out there that will allow this? The platform we are targeting is Windows.
We have been looking at xmlbeansxx but this has not been maintained for 5 years and requires an older version of Boost than we have currently in our system (and do not want to have multiple Boost versions).
CodeSynthesis XSD author here.
First of all, a small nitpick: CodeSynthesis XSD doesn't generate C++ classes from XML. It generates them from XML Schema. From your question it appears that XSD would have worked for you. So I assume you are actually looking to generate C++ from XML Schema.
Now to your question. I don't believe there is a usable and more liberally-licensed C++ tool out there that can do this. Also, if your XML vocabulary is fairly small (e.g., a configuration format), then you may consider using XSD under the free proprietary license. It allows you to use XSD in a commercial application without having to release your source code as long as the amount of the generated code is less than 10,000 lines. And, as the name suggests, it is free (as in no charge).
Related
In C#, I use XSD2Code in order to:
generate automatically entities from XSD
generate methods which serialize/deserialize XML stream in these entities
Does it exist in the native C++ world?
I am looking for libs which work on Windows.
No, C++ has no such feature.
However, there are a plurality of libraries for C++ which provide everything you could possibly need. I am sure that at least several will exist to suit your XML needs (yuck!).
In particular, "CodeSynthesis XSD - XML Data Binding for C++" looks promising.
I get 1,120,000 Google results for xsd xml c++.
I'm looking for a simple non-validating XML parser in either C or C++.
Several years back I found one that was just a single file solution but I can't find
it anymore.
I'm after some links and suggested ones that are very small and lightweight
ideally suited for an embedded platform.
Expat
You can work with or without validation and in "streaming mode". It is very lightweight.
What about something like pugixml. From their site...
pugixml is a light-weight C++ XML
processing library. It features:
DOM-like interface with rich traversal/modification capabilities
Extremely fast non-validating XML parser which constructs the DOM
tree from an XML file/buffer
XPath 1.0 implementation for complex data-driven tree queries
Full Unicode support with Unicode interface variants and
automatic encoding conversions
The library is extremely portable and
easy to integrate and use.
pugixml is developed and maintained
since 2006 and has many users. All
code is distributed under the MIT
license, making it completely free to
use in both open-source and
proprietary applications.
Also, this answer has more info.
There is also tinyxml and RapidXml.
There is definitely a pure C, tiny xml parser available. It was cited in an earlier answer on SO, but I can't find it right now. If I remember right, it's just a few hundred lines of code.
Update: Here's the question/answer that references it:
Is there a good tiny XML parser for an embedded C project?
And the actual code:
http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/cstuff/file/tip/tinyxml
RapidXML is a single-header (multiple headers if you want extra functionality) ultra-lightweight, ultra-fast implementation. It can operate in "destructive" mode, that means by setting pointers right into the XML and possibly overwriting some, avoiding all extra memory allocations and data copies.
tinyxml is not precisely single-header, but it is still fairly lightweight compared to other parsers. I've used it for half a decade without ever encountering an issue. The author has recently started with "tinyxml-2", which is supposedly better and even more lightweight, but I've not had occasion to actually try that one yet.
http://mercurial.intuxication.org/hg/cstuff/file/tip/tinyxml
can this parser work with nested XML like
<CServiceType>
<serno>61</serno>
<caption1 />
<caption2>Satelite</caption2>
<caption3 />
</CServiceType>
I'm not sure what exactly the right term is, kind of like ORM using XML as the data store. Are there any decent tools which will autogenerate C++ classes (including data and serialization/deserialization) based on an XML schema? Or will create XML-sync code and schema based on a C++ class definition?
TinyXML is great but it's so old-school to spend all that time writing code to load/save XML data to classes. I've seen similar tools focused on SOAP/WSDL, but they generated all kinds of other code on top of the basics.
Any good open-source libraries out there?
The only thing I've seen that attempts to do this is CodeSynthesisXSD.
If you are looking for an open source and commercial licensed tool to auto-generate C++ classes, including data and serialization/deserialization, based on an XML schema, then I strongly recommend GSOAP. It is easy to use, compliant to industry standards, and actively maintained.
See also http://www.rpbourret.com/xml/XMLDataBinding.htm
I was disappointed with many other C++ XML tools that promise full data bindings but will fail to process more extensive sets of WSDLs and schemas such as ONVIF. Having to retool an entire project was a pain. I know that GSOAP will do the job. A winner IMHO.
Not open source, but won't XML Thunder work for you?
We are aware of MSXML, based on COM technologies. We want to use it for a VC++ project starting soon. Are there any other XML libraries do good compared to MSXML?
TinyXML - A C++ open source library
Will you be using the .Net Framework if so you may want to look at using linq to xml.
Take a look at RapidXML. Also, Boost.PropertyTree is an abstraction over property trees (XML, JSON, INI, INFO at the time of writing) and relies on RapidXML for its XML parser.
We ditched MSXML in favor of Xerces for our project, although Xerces is also a big, complicated beast. The TinyXML suggestion is probably a good one if it does everything you need it to. If you only need basic SAX model support (and not a DOM), then you might also consider expat which is one of the first widely used XML parsers.
LIBXML
"Libxml2 is the XML C parser and toolkit developed for the Gnome project (but usable outside of the Gnome platform), it is free software available under the MIT License."
I have used it for many years on Win32 projects without problem. It supports both SAX and DOM style reading.
You must take a look at Microsoft XmlLite which is a pull parser for pure C++. The primary goals of XmlLite are ease of use, performance, and standards compliance.
I have an application, written in C++ using MFC and Stingray libraries. The application works with a wide variety of large data types, which are all currently serialized based on MFC Document/View serialize derived functionality. I have also added options for XML serialization based on the Stingray libraries, which implements DOM via the Microsoft XML SDK. While easy to implement the performance is terrible, to the extent that it is unusable on anything other than very small documents.
What other XML serialization tools would you folks recommend for this scenario. I don't want DOM, as it seems to be a memory hog, and I'm already dealing with large in memory data. Ideally, i'd like a streaming parser that is fast, and easy to use with MFC. My current front runner is expat which is fast and simple, but would require a lot of class by class serialization code to be added. Any other efficient and easier to implement alternatives out there that people would recommend?
The Boost Serialization library supports XML. This library basically consists in:
Start from the principles of MFC serialization and take all the good things it provides.
Solve every single issue of MFC serialization!
Among the improvements compared to MFC is support for XML.
Note that you don't necessarily control the XML schema of this serialization. It uses its own schema.
This is an age old problem. I was the team lead of the development team with the most critical path dependencies on the largest software project in the world during 1999 and 2000 and this very issue was the focus of my work during that time. I am convinced that the wheel was invented by multiple engineers who were unaware that others had already invented it. The same is true of XML Data binding in C++. I invented it too, and I've been perfecting it for over 10 years on various projects. I have a solution that addresses the issues noted here and some additional issues that repeatedly arise:
XML Updates. This is the ability to re-apply a subset of XML into an existing object model. In many cases the XML is bound to indexed objects and we cannot afford to re-index for each update.
COM and CORBA interface management. In the same respect that the XML Data Binding can be automated through object oriented practices - so can the instances of interface objects that provide that data to the application layer.
State Tracking. The application often needs to distinguish between an empty value vs. a missing value - both create an empty string. This provides the validation along with Data Binding.
The source code uses the least restrictive license - less so that GPL. The project is supported and managed from here:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/XML/XMLFoundation.aspx
Now that it's the year 2010, I believe that nobody else will attempt to reinvent the wheel because there are a few to choose from. IMHO - this wheel is the most polished and well rounded implementation available.
Enjoy.
A good solution would be libxml. It provides lightweight SAX parsing and data structures for XML processing. There are several DOM libraries which are built on top of libxml.
Unfortunatly it is a C library, but C++ wrappers are available.
A few years ago I switched from MSXML to libxml because of the performance issues you mentioned.
If you decide to use libxml, you should also take a look at libxslt.
We use Xerces-C++. It was easy to setup and performance is good enough so we don't need to think about changing. However we aren't XML heavy.
I did listen to a podcast by Scott Hanselman (from Hansel Minutes) where they discuss the XML performance of MSXML and XSLT.
what about RapidXML, I am using it in an MFC app with some modification to support UTF-16 with std::string. I am quite satisfied with it so far.
The gSOAP toolkit auto-serializes native C and C++ data to/from XML and supports the full XML schema specification through XML data bindings:
gSOAP SourceForge Project
It has evolved since 1999 to a significant code base with code generation tools and libraries. It supports many databinding and customization features, which is especially critical for mapping XML schema types to/from the C and C++ types. It can serialize any C/C++ type and also STL containers, container templates, and cyclic data structures. It has been used in the W3C Schema Patterns for Databinding working group (with 100% schema pattern coverage success since years). There is an active open source user base and the gSOAP development functionality has been used in many industrial projects and Fortune 100 companies to develop SOAP/XML infrastructures.
This is late in the game, I just want to mention that we also use LIBXML. It's robust and reliable, and has worked well. A little bit too low-level, you'll want to build some wrappers on top of its functions.
For instance, you'll get a different sequence of function returns depending on whether you have this:
<tag attribute="value"/>
or this:
<tag attribute="value"> </tag>
Sometimes you may want that, sometimes you don't care.
We use TinyXML for all our XML needs be it MFC or straight C++.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tinyxml