Friendly way to parse XDocument
- by Oli
I have a class that various different XML schemes are created from. I create the various dynamic XDocuments via one (Very long) statement using conditional operators for optional elements and attributes.
I now need to convert the XDocuments back to the class but as they are coming from different schemes many elements and sub elements may be optional. The only way I know of doing this is to use a lot of if statements.
This approach doesn't seem very LINQ and uses a great deal more code than when I create the XDocument so I wondered if there is a better way to do this?
An example would be to get
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root xmlns="somenamespace">
<object attribute1="This is Optional" attribute2="This is required">
<element1>Required</element1>
<element1>Optional</element1>
<List1>
Optional List Of Elements
</List1>
<List2>
Required List Of Elements
</List2>
</object>
</root>
Into
public class Object()
{
public string Attribute1;
public string Attribute2;
public string Element1;
public string Element2;
public List<ListItem1> List1;
public List<ListItem2> List2;
}
In a more LINQ friendly way than this:
public bool ParseXDocument(string xml)
{
XNamespace xn = "somenamespace";
XDocument document = XDocument.Parse(xml);
XElement elementRoot = description.Element(xn + "root");
if (elementRoot != null)
{
//Get Object Element
XElement elementObject = elementRoot.Element(xn + "object");
if(elementObject != null)
{
if(elementObject.Attribute(xn + "attribute1") != null)
{
Attribute1 = elementObject.Attribute(xn + "attribute1");
}
if(elementObject.Attribute(xn + "attribute2") != null)
{
Attribute2 = elementObject.Attribute(xn + "attribute2");
}
else
{
//This is a required Attribute so return false
return false;
}
//If, If/Elses get deeper and deeper for the next elements and lists etc....
}
else
{
//Object is a required element so return false
return false;
}
}
else
{
//Root is a required element so return false
return false;
}
return true;
}
Update: Just to clarify the ParseXDocument method is inside the "Object" class. Every time an xml document is received the Object class instance has some or all of it's values updated.
