C# Object-to-Object Mapping - AutoMapper Example

Imaging this scenario: We have an Employee object with many properties in it, and we want to display our Employee in a DataGrid or some other control. For this purpose we need a lighter version of Employee, let's call it EmployeeViewItem. A list of EmployeeViewItem will need to bind to our DataGrid.

public class Employee
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public Address Address { get; set; }
    public string Position { get; set; }
    public bool Gender { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }            
    public int YearsInCompany { get; set; }
    public DateTime StartDate { get; set; }
}

public class Address
{
    public string Country { get; set; }
    public string City { get; set; }
    public string Street { get; set; }
    public int Number { get; set; }            
}

public class EmployeeViewItem
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
    public string Address { get; set; }
    public string Position { get; set; }
    public string Gender { get; set; }
    public int Age { get; set; }            
    public int YearsInCompany { get; set; }
    public string StartDate { get; set; }
}

Ok, so what we usually do? Something like this, right?

EmployeeViewItem viewItem = new EmployeeViewItem();
viewItem.Name = employee.Name;
viewItem.Email = employee.Email;
viewItem.Address = employee.Address.City + employee.Address.Street + employee.Address.Number;
viewItem.Position = employee.Position;
viewItem.Gender = employee.Gender == true ? "Man" : "Female";
viewItem.Age = employee.Age;
viewItem.YearsInCompany = employee.YearsInCompany;
viewItem.StartDate = employee.StartDate.ToShortDateString();

Quite annoying, isn't it? What if we could do this mapping automatically in some way? I hasten to please you - yes, you can map these two object automatically with AutoMapper! As written on AutoMapper webpage - "AutoMapper is a simple little library built to solve a deceptively complex problem - getting rid of code that mapped one object to another."

C# Reading XML Recursively (XmlDocument)

I'll be honest - I hate Recursion! But, nothing you can do, there are some situations when you know - this problem should be solved with Recursion. One of such problems is XML reading.

Today I'll show a simple example of reading XmlDocument recursively.

This is our XML:

<employees>
    <employee Id="1001" Name="John" Position="Developer">    
        <projects>
            <project Code="Rocket">                
                <budget>7000</budget>
            </project>
        </projects>
    </employee>

    <employee Id="1002" Name="Tomas" Position="Helpdesk">    
        <projects>
            <project Code="Orlando">                
                <budget>1000</budget>
            </project>
            <project Code="Newman">                
                <budget>900</budget>
            </project>
        </projects>
    </employee>
    
    <employee Id="1003" Name="Susan" Position="QA">        
        <projects>            
            <project Code="Newman">                
                <budget>900</budget>
            </project>
            <project Code="Rocket">                
                <budget>7000</budget>
            </project>
            <project Code="Orlando">                
                <budget>1000</budget>
            </project>
        </projects>
    </employee>  
</employees>