I'm trying to parse the xml given below:
<Item status="SUCCESS" message="">
<ItemDate>12/21/2012
<ItemType>MyType1
<ItemUrl title="ItemTitle">http://www.itemurl1.com</ItemUrl>
</ItemType>
</ItemDate>
<ItemDate>12/22/2012
<ItemType>MyType2
<ItemUrl title="Item2Title">http://www.itemurl2.com</ItemUrl>
</ItemType>
</ItemDate>
</Item>
As you could see I'm not sure whether we can call this xml, but this si what I get out of a legacy service. What I'm after is to parse this and load it into an object graph. My object model is as below:
public class Item
{
public string Date { get; set; }
public string Type { get; set; }
public string Url { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
}
So, basically when I'm done with parsing the above xml/string I get a collection of Item objects. Can you please suggest me how to achieve this with some code snippet?
I tried with XDocument, but I was not able to do it given the peculiar structure of xml.
Thanks,
-Mike
XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(path_to_xml);
var query = from date in xdoc.Descendants("ItemDate")
let type = date.Element("ItemType")
let url = type.Element("ItemUrl")
select new Item()
{
ItemDate = ((XText)date.FirstNode).Value,
ItemType = ((XText)type.FirstNode).Value,
ItemUrl = (string)url,
ItemTitle = (string)url.Attribute("title"),
};
As an alternative to lazyberezovsky's
Linq2Xml
projection, you might also consider doing the flattening using an Xml Transform before loading the Xml.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
version="1.0"
>
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" method="xml" version="1.0" indent="yes" />
<xsl:template match="/">
<Items>
<xsl:apply-templates select="Item/ItemDate" />
</Items>
</xsl:template>
<xsl:template match="ItemDate">
<Item>
<xsl:attribute name="ItemDate">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(./text()[1])" />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="ItemType">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(ItemType/text()[1])" />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="ItemUrl">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(ItemType/ItemUrl/text()[1])" />
</xsl:attribute>
<xsl:attribute name="ItemTitle">
<xsl:value-of select="normalize-space(ItemType/ItemUrl/@title)" />
</xsl:attribute>
</Item>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>
This produces the following Xml, which is straightforward to deserialize, e.g. using the [XmlAttribute]
attribute with XmlDocument.
<Items>
<Item ItemDate="12/21/2012" ItemType="MyType1" ItemUrl="http://www.itemurl1.com" ItemTitle="ItemTitle" />
<Item ItemDate="12/22/2012" ItemType="MyType2" ItemUrl="http://www.itemurl2.com" ItemTitle="Item2Title" />
</Items>
Because you have the node Item only once in the sent xml you get only one Item from lazyberezovsky's code. And that is correct. I suppose you want to get items but load them by ItemDate nodes. To do so use the following modified code:
XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(new StringReader(xml));
var query = from i in xdoc.Descendants( "ItemDate" )
let date = i
let type = date.Element("ItemType")
let url = type.Element("ItemUrl")
select new Item()
{
Date = ((XText) date.FirstNode).Value,
Type = ((XText) type.FirstNode).Value,
Url = (string) url,
Title = (string) url.Attribute("title"),
};
var items = query.ToList();