Refactoring for the sake of compactness and reusability

Currently I'm doing a rather monotonic work, let's call it like this. We basically need to serialize our data to an XML file that has to match a given XSD which has been given to us by our customer. The problem, the XSD has not nearly the same structure of our own domain model which implies a lot of property 1-1 mapping between the C# objects generated from the XSD file and our domain model. Automatism?? Not really applicable. I tried already to figure out to which degree libs like AutoMapper could be useful but concluded that it wouldn't really bring much in the end.

A nice thing when coding such object mappings is that there emerge patterns which can then be refactored nicely, also because these mapping stores involve an overall structural/architectural design initially but then they are nearly a pure typing exercise (which often isn't that bad too). Take the example below:

List<SoggAggiudicatarioType> soggAggiudicatarioTypes = new List<SoggAggiudicatarioType>();
if (awardCompanies != null)
{
    foreach (ICompanyDetail companyDetail in awardCompanies)
    {
        soggAggiudicatarioTypes.Add(MapAwardCompanySoggAggiudicatarioType(companyDetail));
    }
}
convertedType.Aggiudicatari = soggAggiudicatarioTypes.ToArray<SoggAggiudicatarioType>();

This was one re-occurring pattern. A list of objects from our domain model had to be mapped accordingly to an array of a generated XSD type. Lot's of mostly similar constructs emerged so I refactored the whole stuff above to the following:

convertedType.Aggiudicatari = 
  MapArray<ICompanyDetail, SoggAggiudicatarioType>(awardCompanies,MapAwardCompanySoggAggiudicatarioType);

Transforms in a nice one-liner :) and saves you from cramps in your fingers ;) . But the code hasn't disappeared, it has just been refactored to the given, generic method:

protected TConvertTo[] MapArray<TConvertFrom, TConvertTo>(List<TConvertFrom> sourceData, Func<TConvertFrom, TConvertTo> convertFunction)
{
    List<TConvertTo> convertedResult = new List<TConvertTo>();
    if (sourceData != null)
    {
        foreach (TConvertFrom sourceItem in sourceData)
        {
            TConvertTo converted = convertFunction.Invoke(sourceItem);
            convertedResult.Add(converted);
        }
    }

    return convertedResult.ToArray<TConvertTo>();
}

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