Xsd2So

xsd2so provides a tool to generate Unity ScriptableObjects (SO) from an XSD and also provides parsing capabilities, so you can easily parse the content of a matching XML into the SO.

So this projects fuses XML data binding with Unity's native serialization capabilities.

The idea came from being unsatisfied by the performance (parsing times and file size) of an existing XML-based workflow, which handled balancing data for a commercial game. Changing the XML-based workflow was not an option because too many other tools and people were involved. To still tackle the problem, xsd2so was implemented as an automatic translation tool between both the XML-based workflow and Unity's native serialization capabilities.

What is this repository for?

• generate C# code from XSD
• generate matching SO code (in C#)
• also generates parsing of XML data to a SO instance

How do I get set up?

• Import the package in your project
• create an editor script to use xsd2So, see ExampleConverter.ConvertFixedAsset1() for more details

or

• clone the repository
• open in Unity 5.3.4 or any Unity 5.4.x

Hint This tool has not been tested with any Unity 20xx versions and will probably not work, especially since the switch away from the custom Mono implementation.

Contribution guidelines

If you have an idea or want to suggest an improvement:

Either

• fork, modify an create a pull request.

or

• create an issue

If you found a bug:

Please create an issue with a minimal example XSD/XML and a description of the issue.

License

xsd2So is released under an MIT/X11 license; see the LICENSE file.

Performance measurements

This whole project has the main intention to utilize the performance-optimized deserialization from Unity while not changing an existing XML-based workflow. To proof that the whole thing is worth it, this repo contains some loading time tests, see the XSD menu of this project in Unity.

Some results are the following. The test machine is a PC with

• Windows 10 64bit
• 8 GB DDR3 1600 Mhz RAM
• Intel Core i5-4690K @ 3.5 Ghz
• data loaded from a 1TB HDD

Each measurement was done 30 times and min/max/average values where calculated from Stopwatch data.

Small example (1.76kb XML vs 4.47kb SO, same data content)

Format	min	max	avg
XML	00:00:00.0017389	00:00:00.0136228	00:00:00.0022552
SO	00:00:00.0000866	00:00:00.0004697	00:00:00.0001085

Big example (5.24MB XML vs 1.45MB SO, same data content)

Format	min	max	avg
XML	00:00:01.4400673	00:00:01.4848626	00:00:01.4504397
SO	00:00:00.0000170	00:00:00.1129411	00:00:00.1057949

Notes

This project was originally a Mercurial repository from another code repository hosting and was imported into GitHub.

This project was tested only with the Unity 5.x version range. Newer Unity versions probably do not work, especially since Unity moved their own Mono implementation towards a standard .NET implementation. Mono has some specialities when it comes to code generation via System.CodeDOM.