Deserialization from REST API XML to List C#

Question

Before writing this question, I tried this, this and this method. I spent the whole day on it and could not get the result.

I have my own REST API which returns a serialized List<T> in XML file

    [ActionName("planes")]
    [HttpGet]
    public IEnumerable<Planes> GetPlanes()
    {
        using (DB_A5vehiclesEntities entities = new DB_A5_vehiclesEntities())
        {
            return entities.Planes.ToList();
        }
    }

Generated XML file looks like this (link to xml file):

<ArrayOfPlanes xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/VehicleDataAccess">
  <Planes>
    <FirstFlyYear>1932</FirstFlyYear>
    <Id>18</Id>
    <Name>18</Name>
    //other values
</Planes>
//other items

My code:

IList<Plane> myList = null;

        string xml = @"http://bo7145907-001-site2.ftempurl.com/wtvapi/vehicles/planes";
        XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(List<Plane>));
        using (StringReader reader = new StringReader(xml))
        {

            myList = serializer.Deserialize(reader) as List<Plane>;
        }

        textMessage = FindViewById<TextView>(Resource.Id.message);

    }

And i get the error: System.Xml.XmlException: 'Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1

All I want is just connect to API, deserialize XML and get List<T> with all XML elements. How to do it right?

Your question doesn't (IMHO) explain what your actual error is. Is the issue mapping you data to the XML structure, returning Json (not XML) from your API or something else? — Kane, Jun 25 '20 at 21:33
A well formed XML has only one root tag. So XML Serializer fails when you have a list like what you did : typeof(List). So you need two classes Planes and Plane. Then in the serializer have : typeof(Planes). Then in Planes have public List Planes — jdweng, Jun 25 '20 at 22:22
Without the User Agent and the Accept JSON was being returned. So there are two issues. See my answer for working results. Getting results manually in a browser was xml, but when I checked in my c# code it was JSON. I had to use a sniffer to check headers in the browser results and then use same headers in the c# code. — jdweng, Jun 26 '20 at 06:57

jdweng · Accepted Answer · 2020-06-26T10:27:30.533

Try following :

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System.Xml.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.IO;

namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
    class Program
    {
        const string URL = "http://bo7145907-001-site2.ftempurl.com/wtvapi/vehicles/planes";
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {

            HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(URL);
            request.Headers.Add(HttpRequestHeader.AcceptLanguage, "en-US\r\n");
            request.UserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.116 Safari/537.36\r\n";
            request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml\r\n";

            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();

            XmlReader xReader = XmlReader.Create(response.GetResponseStream());

            XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ArrayOfPlanes));
            ArrayOfPlanes planes = (ArrayOfPlanes)serializer.Deserialize(xReader);
 
        }
    }
    [XmlRoot(ElementName = "ArrayOfPlanes", Namespace = "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/VehicleDataAccess")]
    public class ArrayOfPlanes
    {
        [XmlElement(ElementName = "Planes", Namespace = "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/VehicleDataAccess")]
        public List<Planes> Plains { get; set; }
    }
    public class Planes
    {
    }
}

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 26 '20 at 00:56

Using HttpClient provides concise and efficient code.

string url = "http://bo7145907-001-site2.ftempurl.com/wtvapi/vehicles/planes";
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ArrayOfPlanes));
ArrayOfPlanes arrayOfPlanes;

using (var client = new HttpClient())
{
    client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("Accept", "text/xml");

    using (var stream = await client.GetStreamAsync(url))
    {
        arrayOfPlanes = (ArrayOfPlanes)serializer.Deserialize(stream);
    }
}

Set of classes.

[XmlRoot(Namespace = "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/VehicleDataAccess")]
public class ArrayOfPlanes
{
    [XmlElement(Namespace = "http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/VehicleDataAccess")]
    public List<Planes> Planes { get; set; }
}

public class Planes
{
    public bool AAMissile { get; set; }
    // ...
}

Deserialization from REST API XML to List C#

2 Answers2

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