Archive for August, 2011

Hi,

This is an interesting simple but very useful stuff.   XML Manipulating is a task that some times consumes a lots of time depending on the complexity of XML. But this post is discussing about an interesting way to manipulate XML content in C#. Good way to learn things is learning through example. Let’s look at a very simple example to a simple XML file.

Creating XML File

Let’s create a simple xml file called Students.xml

<Students>
  <Student>
    <Id>Stu001</Id>
    <Name>Sam</Name>
  </Student>
  <Student>
    <Id>Stu002</Id>
    <Name>John</Name>
  </Student>
  <Student>
    <Id>Stu003</Id>
    <Name>Tom</Name>
  </Student>
</Students>

Let’s Read

Now let’s read our xml file with LINQ.

            //Loading XML Document
            XDocument Students = XDocument.Load(@"Students.xml");
            //get all student elements and assign them to Anonymous Object
            var StudentList = from x in Students.Descendants("Student")
                       select new
                       {
                           Id=x.Element("Id").Value,
                           Name = x.Element("Name").Value

                       };

            //Iterate thorugh the results set to print
            foreach (var student in StudentList)
            {

                Console.WriteLine(student.Id.ToString());
                Console.WriteLine(student.Name.ToString());
                Console.WriteLine("----------------------");

            }
            //Console ReadLine to keep the console window open after execution
            Console.ReadLine();

Let’s dig into the code

First we are creating an XDocument to load the particular XML file from directory

XDocument Students = XDocument.Load(@"Students.xml");

Now get all the descendants of Student XML element and assign them to a Anonymous (Not Type Specific) object.

var StudentList = from x in Students.Descendants("Student")
select new
{
     Id=x.Element("Id").Value,
     Name = x.Element("Name").Value
};

Finally iterate through the results set and print them out

foreach (var student in StudentList)
{
   Console.WriteLine(student.Id.ToString());
   Console.WriteLine(student.Name.ToString());
   Console.WriteLine("----------------------");
}

The above code will read the xml file and displays the results in the console.

XML Details in Console Window

Download Source Code

Like a piece of cake. Isn’t it ?
Yes. We are done.  Happy Coding