How to deserialize xml created by to_xml() in google appengine
Just to clarify, I'm going to assume that you're asking about the Model.to_xml() method, and that by efficient you mean a single method which you can call which will provide you with a model object.
As you noted, there is no such method on the Model class for the datastore API. I think the intention is that the purpose of the to XML method is to make the model easily exportable to another application, such as a javascript client or for importing into another database or storage mechanism, similar to using the remote API.
It should be possible to create a function or static method of a specific Model class which would generate a new model of a particular type from parsed XML. You will then most likely want to perform a get_or_insert() to write the resulting object.
If you're looking for a native Python to Python serialization method, you could consider pickle.
In Google App Engine, I can serialize an object by calling its to_xml() method.
There doesnt appear to be an equivalent from_xml() method to deserialize the xml.
Is there an efficient way to deserialize back to an object?