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I am having trouble deserializing my XML data into the data structures I've defined. I don't have any control over the creation of the XML, but it is structured like:

<order id="123456">
   <userid>555</userid>
   <merchant id="111">SomeMerchant</merchant>
</order>

I get the top level attributes and simple element values okay, but the part that is giving me issues is assigning the value of a child element to a property in a child class. My data structures look something like:

public class OrderData
{
    [XmlElement("merchant", typeof(OrderMerchant))]
    public OrderMerchant Merchant { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("id")]
    public int OrderID { get; set; }
}

[Serializable]
public class OrderMerchant
{
    [XmlElement("merchant")]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("id")]
    public int ID { get; set; }
}

My problem: When I deserialize the XML and get an object, I have a Merchant object with an ID of 111 but a null Name. How do I mark up my object so that the element text is assigned to the Name attribute? I tried using the element name and I've tried an XPath expression (but I don't even know if that's allowed in this context).

Kris Oye
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1 Answers1

3

You're telling the serializer to serialize an element merchant, and then the merchant object expects to receive another element "merchant" that will contain the name. Instead, mark the Name property with the attribute [XmlText] like so:

[Serializable]
public class OrderMerchant
{
    [XmlText]
    public string Name { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("id")]
    public int ID { get; set; }
}

And that should do it

Source

Community
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Matt
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  • Right... that's why I was thinking some sort of XPath expression to get the current element/root... XmlText was exactly right! Thanks... and my bad for not finding the original (I did look). – Kris Oye Feb 17 '16 at 23:58