Question

An example XML file is this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<game>
    <name>bomber</name>
    <behaviors-used>
        <behavior id="Bullet" version="1">Bullet</behavior>
        <behavior id="Fade" version="1">Fade</behavior>
        <behavior id="Flash" version="1">Flash</behavior>
        <behavior id="Sin" version="1">Sine</behavior>
        <behavior id="scrollto" version="1">Scroll To</behavior>
    </behaviors-used>
</game>

I have the query:

var data = (from item in loaded.Descendants("game")
            select new
            {
                name = item.Element("name").Value,
                behaviorlist = item.Element("behaviors-used").Value
            }).Single();

Which seems to work fine. However, I need to now retrieve all the <behavior> elements in the behaviorlist. I can’t seem to do it like this:

var bq = (from c in data.behaviorlist select new { behaviour = c.Element("behaviour")});

(Throws invalid syntax errors).

How do I retrive all the behaviours and not only access their text but also the properties id and version?

Answer 1

Your behaviorlist is not really a list right now – you want the elements not the combined text, so instead of using the Value property of the parent node, you should retrieve the Elements with name “behavior”:

var data = (from item in loaded.Descendants("game")
            select new
            {
                name = item.Element("name").Value,
                behaviorlist = item.Element("behaviors-used").Elements("behavior")
            }).Single();

From the resulting list you can then easily retrieve the properties:

var bq = (from c in data.behaviorlist select new 
{ 
    id = c.Attribute("id").Value,
    version = c.Attribute("version").Value,
});