Working With Web Response Stream and De-serialization into C# object

Question

I have 2 specific questions with regards to passing a System.IO.Stream (from a method) and deserialization into object (another method).

XML Response I get from a WebRequest (please note there are no root tags)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response id="-2d953936:14174bb0cf3:-5213">
      <date>2013-10-01 12:01:55.532999</date>
      <status>
             <current>open</current>
             <next>after</next>
             <change_at>16:00:00</change_at>
      </status>
      <message>Market is open</message>
      <unixtime>1380643315</unixtime>
</response>

Method 1 - ResponseMethod - Currently returning string

private static string GetResponse(HttpWebRequest request)
{
      var v_Response = request.GetResponse();
      var v_DataStream = v_Response.GetResponseStream();

      var v_Reader = new System.IO.StreamReader(v_DataStream);
      var x_XMLResponse = v_Reader.ReadToEnd();

       //Close all Stream logic
       v_Reader.Close(); v_DataStream.Close(); v_Response.Close();

       return x_XMLResponse;
}

Method 2 - Convert the XML to an object

// I would use XDocument and Lin2XML to get my typed object - for example MarketStatus

Questions are:

1. I am currently passing string from Method 1. That doesnt help me in deserializing from XML to object. Should I be passing the return value as StreamReader and then use that as an input into method 2 to get my typed object. Is that a standard approach or there are better ways to this?
2. My ultimate objective is that the return value from second method should be an object.

Additional Note:

1. The reason this functionality is broken into 2 methods because I want the web response method and deserailization separate for testing purposes.
2. I don't have an XSD but have created a MarketStatus Class

Any code snippets/suggestions will really appreciate

Answer 1

We typically use a generic method, similar to the following (simplified for posting), which uses the XMLSerializer to deserialize an XML string representation into the corresponding object.

    public T ReturnObjectfromXml<T>(string xmlForm)
    {
        XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
        StringReader sr = new StringReader(xmlForm);
        XmlTextReader xts = new XmlTextReader(sr);
        return ((T)xs.Deserialize(xts));
    }

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Answer 2

It looks like you are doing some type of message passing . You will be better off using WCF or ASP.NET Web API instead of rolling your own infrastructure code (to serialize and de-serialize).

To answer question 1: No, it is better to return a string and dispose of the reader as soon as you are done with it. See When should I dispose my objects in .NET?

Comment on note 1: In most cases, you wouldn't want to unit test the serialization/deserialization.