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Parsing XML using LINQ

Just started using LINQ as it seems very powerful at the moment but a little difficult to get in to. Consider the following XML...

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<whereabouts date="15/9/2011" gangid="GB">
<job postcode="SG5 1EH" address="my address">
<patch id="25168" status="" surface_id="6mm Ashpalt" />
<patch id="25169" status="" surface_id="6mm Ashpalt" />
</job> 
<job postcode="SG5 2EH" address="17 High Street" >
<patch id="25198" surface_id="6mm Ashpalt />
<patch id="25199" surface_id="6mm Ashpalt/>
</job>
</whereabouts>

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I have an object Job which contains a List<Patch> where Patch is another object. Firstly I want to be able to read just the 'whereabouts' node so that I can perform a quick sanity check - how do you select a single node like this?

Secondly I would like to read all of the jobs and patches into objects. I know that I could do something like :-

List<Job> jobs =
	(from job in xmlDoc.Descendants("job")
	select new Job
	{
	Postcode = job.Element("postcode").Value,
	Address = job.Element("address").Value,
	}).ToList<Job>();

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To read the jobs into a list of <Job> objects but is it possible to read the 'Patches' sub-nodes and directly populate the list of patches within each job? If not how can I associate the patches with the job?

Bob Learned

I believe that you are looking for something like this:

List<Job> jobs =
	(from job in xmlDoc.Descendants("job")
	select new Job
	{
    	    Postcode = job.Element("postcode").Value,
	    Address = job.Element("address").Value,
            PatchList = job.Elements("patch"),
	}).ToList<Job>();

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Easwaran Paramasivam

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SOLUTION

nixkuroi

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Jeroen Timmermans

Another route is to serialize the XML to the Job-object.

ChrisMDrew

ASKER

Thanks to all - this has made my business object very easy to generate from the XML. Adding checks to ensure that the attributes exist is definately a good idea also.