Load string to LINQ classes and query it

Question

I don't know too much about this subject yet, so I'm open to any suggestions that lead to my end goal...

I receive an XML string from a web service
I would like to load the string into a C# class capable of being used for LINQ
I would like to be able to extract an array of all "someentity" instances in the XML using LINQ with that class.

Here's some sample XML I made up with the someentity example:

<replydata>
    <someentity>
        <role id="1234" roletype="2" />
        <history length="24" accessstr="http://someurl" />
    </someentity>
    <someentity>
        <role id="1235" roletype="2" />
        <history length="30" accessstr="http://someurl2" />
    </someentity>
    ... keep repeating for a while
</replydata>

Is this possible, and if so, can someone provide a simple example or direct me to the right place to find one?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/364253/how-to-deserialize-xml-document You should be able to de-serialize into a multi-dimensional object graph - and then go nuts! — Dave Bish, Apr 18 '12 at 16:33

Sergey Kalinichenko · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-18T16:42:31.893

2

You can do it like this:

var responseString =
    @"<replydata>
        <someentity>
            <role id=""1234"" roletype=""2"" />
            <history length=""24"" accessstr=""http://someurl"" />
        </someentity>
        <someentity>
            <role id=""1235"" roletype=""2"" />
            <history length=""30"" accessstr=""http://someurl2"" />
        </someentity>
    </replydata>";
var response = XElement.Load(new StringReader(responseString));
var someentitys = response.Elements("someentity");
foreach(var e in someentitys) {
    Console.WriteLine(
        "Role: {0}, access: {1}"
    ,   e.Element("role").Attribute("roletype")
    ,   e.Element("history").Attribute("accessstr")
    );
}

edited Apr 18 '12 at 16:42

answered Apr 18 '12 at 16:35

Sergey Kalinichenko

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@downvoter I'm curious what do you think is wrong with this code: it runs perfectly fine, printing the expected lines. What gives?.. – Sergey Kalinichenko Apr 18 '12 at 16:46
Works with a copy paste, you're a legend ;) LINQ is amazingly confusing at first glance, haha. – John Humphreys Apr 18 '12 at 16:50

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 18 '12 at 16:44

The class you're looking for here is XDocument

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.linq.xdocument.aspx

You can create an XDocument from an XML String using it's Parse() method and then use LINQ to query that document.

Here's an article that demos its LINQ Capabilities

http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2010/10/understanding-c-simple-linq-to.html

Load string to LINQ classes and query it

2 Answers2