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Unexpected output of xsd.exe

Consider the following simple schema:
<xs:schema xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:element name="MyRoot">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:group ref="MyChoice" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:group name="MyChoice">
<xs:choice>
<xs:element name="a" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="b" type="xs:string"/>
<xs:element name="c" type="xs:string"/>
</xs:choice>
</xs:group>
</xs:schema>
When turning this into C# code with xsd.exe (VS2017), I get the following output:
public partial class MyRoot {
private string[] aField;
private string[] bField;
private string[] cField;
// ... omitted for brevity ...
}
This code has a major problem: in the XSD/XML all of the sub-elements (a, b and c) were ordered.
This order is now lost in the C# class, since there are three different arrays for each of the sub elements.
Is xsd.exe doing it wrong? Or am I using it wrong? Or is the .xsd file flawed?

How define two elements with same name with same type in two different position in schema

I have a scenario where i have xml schema with same element name with same type at two different positions. Some xml will have the element in first position and few other xml are having the element in the second position.
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="DisplayUnit" type="DisplayUnit" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Serial" type="Serial" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="DisplayUnit" type="DisplayUnit"/>
In my xml some time DisplayUnit comes above serial and some time after that. How i handle this scenario?
I have one more clarification. In this below scenario the element is not a type but a property. The position can be either above or below output element, but occurs only once like the first scenario.
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="0" name="MaxA" nillable="true" type="xs:unsignedInt" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="0" name="Output" type="Output" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="MaxA" nillable="true" type="xs:unsignedInt" />
I searched a lot but i didn't get any solution.
Any immediate help in this regard is appreciated.

Your question has two parts: the XSD part and the parser part.
XSD
Your XSD does not fit for the result you want to achieve. As it is written, it is possible that the DisplayUnit element occurrs twice in your document. There are two ways to resolve this, depending on your scenario.
If the DisplayUnit and Serial elements are the only elements in the sequence or the entire sequence can be in any order, you can use <xs:all> instead of <xs:sequence>. <xs:all> allows the elements to be in any order:
<xs:all>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="DisplayUnit" type="DisplayUnit" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Serial" type="Serial" />
</xs:all>
If this is not an option for you, because the other elements are expected to be in sequence, you can replace that part of the sequence by an <xs:choice>:
<xs:choice>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="DisplayUnit" type="DisplayUnit" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Serial" type="Serial" />
</xs:sequence>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="Serial" type="Serial" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="DisplayUnit" type="DisplayUnit" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:choice>
Parsing in C#
Once you have fixed your XSD and you have validated your document, you know that there is exactly zero or one occurrence of the DisplayUnit and Serial tags. Then you can simply load the XML into an XDocument or XmlDocument (if you didn't do that already) and simply access the elements by their name (regardles of order):
//Assuming there is an XElement named parentElement
XElement displayUnitElement = parentElement.Element("DisplayUnit");
if (displayUnitElement != null) {
//...
}
XElement serialElement = parentElement.Element("Serial");
if (serialElement != null) {
//...
}
On more complex XML you can also use XPath. Once your document validates against the XSD, you can be sure about its structure.

XSD2Code classes require duplicate-named element containing collection of elements

Given XSD like:
<xs:complexType name="accident">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="NAME" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="DESCRIPTION" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="CREATIONDATE" type="xs:dateTime" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:element name="accidents">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="accident" type="accident" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
I expect XML like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<accidents>
<accident>
<NAME>Accident 123</NAME>
<DESCRIPTION>Car crash</DESCRIPTION>
<CREATIONDATE>2016-01-20T12:08:00+00:00</CREATIONDATE>
</accident>
</accidents>
I used XSD2Code to generate C# classes so I can easy deserialize XML from a web-service. But they weren't working right - they were successfully loading a test XML like my example but there were zero accident elements.
So I decided to reverse the process:
accidents aa = new accidents();
accident a = new accident();
a.NAME = "test";
aa.accident.Add(a);
aa.SaveToFile("accidents.xml");
This emitted the following XML:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<accidents xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<accident>
<accident>
<NAME>test</NAME>
<CREATIONDATE>0001-01-01T00:00:00</CREATIONDATE>
</accident>
</accident>
</accidents>
If I attempt to deserialize that XML, it works just fine. But note, there is a nested accident which is not correct and I have no idea it would do this or what to do to fix it!
This seems to be a similar question but since it didn't get much attention and the XSD isn't included, I'm not sure: xsd2code creates extra nested collection when serializing lists

I'm a bit late on the scene for this one but here goes anyway !!
I have been using Xsd2Code myself for a while to take advantage of some cool features, but I have found it does have some annoying quirks. I agree that this issue you describe looks like a bug. However I have found that the issue disappears if your collection is itself a child element of another complex type. If you are happy for your "accidents" to exist as a property of a "report" for example, then you would alter your schema as follows:
<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" elementFormDefault="qualified">
<xs:complexType name="accident">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="NAME" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="DESCRIPTION" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="CREATIONDATE" type="xs:dateTime" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:complexType name="accidents">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="accident" type="accident" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:complexType name="report">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="accidents" type="accidents"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:schema>
When you run this through the Xsd2Code tool you will find that the
generated code creates the accidents property of report type as a list of accidents and will serialize in the way you would expect it.
Your test code should look more like this:
report r = new report();
r.accidents = new List<accident>();
accident a = new accident();
a.NAME = "test";
r.accidents.Add(a);
r.SaveToFile("accidents.xml");
The dodgy accidents class is still generated unfortunately - which could cause confusion to other developers, but there is a way to prevent this.
First, put the accident and accidents complexType definitions in a
file, accidents.xsd. Then put the report definition in report.xsd with
an include statement referencing accidents.xsd. Only pass report.xsd
through the Xsd2Code tool. The malformed accidents class will not appear in the generated code. This is just an illustrative example of course - expand as required. In the absence of a fix, this has been a very good solution for me - hopefully it will suit your needs.

You might start by specifying a target namespace and explicit qualification flags in your XSD. That is, convert your xsd to:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xs:schema attributeFormDefault="unqualified"
elementFormDefault="qualified"
xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
targetNamespace="http://example.com/foo"
xmlns="http://example.com/foo">
<xs:complexType name="accident">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="NAME" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="DESCRIPTION" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element name="CREATIONDATE" type="xs:dateTime" />
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
<xs:element name="accidents">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="accident" type="accident" maxOccurs="unbounded" minOccurs="0"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:schema>
and your XML to:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<accidents xmlns="http://example.com/foo"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://example.com/foo foo.xsd">
<accident>
<NAME>Accident 123</NAME>
<DESCRIPTION>Car crash</DESCRIPTION>
<CREATIONDATE>2016-01-20T12:08:00+00:00</CREATIONDATE>
</accident>
</accidents>
(You will need to save your xsd file as foo.exe for the above reference to work).
I'm not sure if this will fix your XSD2Code issue, but I've used this header format with xsd.exe for lots of equivalent (and much more complex) code. It gets you Intellisense in your XML and might also be sufficient to get XSD2Code to behave properly.

Why does this XML validate, when it shouldn't?

I have the following XSD files:
ReadFile.xsd:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xs:schema xmlns="elsag:lprcore" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="elsag:lprcore" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:include schemaLocation="Read.xsd" />
<xs:element name="reads" type="ReadFile" />
<xs:complexType name="ReadFile">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="read" nillable="true" type="read">
</xs:element>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:schema>
Read.xsd:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xs:schema xmlns="elsag:lprcore" elementFormDefault="qualified" targetNamespace="elsag:lprcore" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<xs:include schemaLocation="Snapshot.xsd"/>
<xs:include schemaLocation="GPS.xsd"/>
<xs:simpleType name="guid">
<xs:restriction base="xs:string">
<xs:pattern value="[0-9a-fA-F]{8}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{4}-[0-9a-fA-F]{12}" />
</xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>
<xs:element name="read" type="read"/>
<xs:complexType name="read">
<xs:complexContent mixed="false">
<xs:extension base="snapshot">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="timestamp" type="xs:dateTime" />
<xs:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="plate" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="1" name="state" type="xs:string" />
<xs:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="confidence" type="xs:int" />
<xs:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="overviews">
</xs:annotation>
<xs:complexType>
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" name="snapshot" type="snapshot"/>
</xs:sequence>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
<xs:element minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="1" name="gps" type="gps" />
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name="id" type="guid" use="required" />
<xs:attribute name="camera" type="xs:string" use="required" />
</xs:extension>
</xs:complexContent>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:schema>
Please note that there are more files that make up the XSD, but I don't believe they're relevant to the problem so I did not include them.
I'm using the following code to validate XML files being processed. I want to reject any file that doesn't validate without errors:
StringBuilder validationErrors = new StringBuilder();
inDoc.Validate( schemas, ( o, e ) => {
validationErrors.AppendLine( e.Message );
} );
if ( !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace( validationErrors.ToString() ) ) {
. . .
}
I've passed the following XML file to the code above and the code does not generate any validation error messages for it.
<read>
<timestamp>2015-07-17T16:20:18.1540000-04:00</timestamp>
<plate>FED456</plate>
</read>
I would have thought that the lack of the reads tag surrounding the read tag would have caused the XML to fail validation. Is the problem in the validation code or is it in the XSD or is this normal?
EDIT:
Here is the code that initializes the schemas variable:
XmlSchemaSet schemas = new XmlSchemaSet();
schemas.Add( "elsag:lprcore", #"XML\ReadFile.xsd" );

Because you have defined
<xs:element name="read" type="read"/>
the read element is a valid root element for your XML. Every element which is an immediate child of <xs:schema> is eligible for being a root element (even those in an included schema).

Thanks to information posted in the answer by Glorfindel and the link posted by overslacked, I've been able to get the XML validation in my program to work.
The problem was that the program would not flag an XML file that does not contain a namespace as invalid. The cause is that the XDocument.Validate extension method creates an XmlReader object whose XmlReaderSettings property does not contain the ReportValidationWarnings flag. As a result, the ValidationEventHandler delegate passed to the method is not called for these files.
To make the validation logic work, I defined a new extension method that includes the flag:
internal static class XmlValidationExtension {
public static void ValidateWithWarnings( this XDocument doc, XmlSchemaSet schemas, ValidationEventHandler validationCallback ) {
XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings();
settings.ValidationType = ValidationType.Schema;
settings.Schemas.Add( schemas );
settings.ValidationFlags |= XmlSchemaValidationFlags.ProcessSchemaLocation;
settings.ValidationFlags |= XmlSchemaValidationFlags.ReportValidationWarnings;
settings.ValidationEventHandler += new ValidationEventHandler( validationCallback );
XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create( doc.CreateReader(), settings );
while ( reader.Read() ) ;
}
}
This is essentially the same exact code from the question linked to by overslacked, but where the XmlReader is created by calling the XDocment object's CreateReader method.
This code now considers any XML file which does not use the correct namespace to be invalid. Any other part of the XML that does not match the XSD is also flagged.

XSD element with one xml child and then content (including html/xml)

I have an xml document that contains some html.
<begin-line>
<verse-num>6</verse-num>a mixed people<footnote id="f2">
Or <i>a foreign people</i>; Hebrew <i>a bastard</i>
</footnote> shall dwell in Ashdod,
</begin-line>
The verse-num element is the only element I wan't validated, the rest I want valideted to one large group of a string type, which can hold html, and also sometimes some more xml (like footnote).
Here is the schema I have right now which doesn't do the trick.
<xs:element maxOccurs="unbounded" name="begin-line">
<xs:complexType mixed="true">
<xs:sequence minOccurs="0">
<xs:choice maxOccurs="unbounded">
<xs:element name="verse-num">
<xs:complexType>
<xs:simpleContent>
<xs:extension base="xs:unsignedByte">
<xs:attribute name="begin-chapter" type="xs:unsignedByte" use="optional" />
</xs:extension>
</xs:simpleContent>
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
</xs:choice>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:attribute name="class" type="xs:string" use="optional" />
</xs:complexType>
</xs:element>
I am using XSD.exe to generate a class that I can deserialize this junk into.
It is generating a begin-line object with a verse-num type below it, and also an array of text, which are split by the html/xml tags inside of .
What I need is an xsd that can be used by XSD.exe to generate a begin-line class that will give me a verse-num type, and then one string property that will contain the rest of the content (including text, i's, b's, footnotes, xml/html).
I did some research and it seems like processContents will do the trick, but I can't figure out where to put it.
When it comes down to it, I want to program against the object created by the XSD.exe like this.
var beginLine = new crosswaybiblePassageVerseunitBeginline();
Console.WriteLine((beginLine.Items[0] as crosswaybiblePassageVerseunitBeginlineVersenum).Value);
Console.Write(beginLine.Text);
or maybe even...
var beginLine = new crosswaybiblePassageVerseunitBeginline();
Console.WriteLine(beginLine.Versenum.Value);
Console.Write(beginLine.Text);

I'm not sure how to setup the schema such that it'll provide nice output from XSD.exe but you can specify "any number of elements with any name" in the output using a type with the definition:
<xs:complexType name="AnyChildren">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:any processContents="lax" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="##any"/>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:anyAttribute />
</xs:complexType>
For example to validate:
<Module>
<Title>Hello World</Title>
<ProviderType>xyz</ProviderType>
<Content />
<MoreContent />
</Module>
You could use:
<xs:complexType name="Module">
<xs:sequence>
<xs:element name="Title" type="xs:string" maxOccurs="1" />
<xs:element name="ProviderType" type="xs:string" minOccurs="1" nillable="false" />
<xs:any processContents="skip" minOccurs="0" maxOccurs="unbounded" namespace="##any"/>
</xs:sequence>
<xs:anyAttribute />
</xs:complexType>