Question

I am a university student taking a HCI design course, and using C# and WPF for the first time. I have read a little about xml, and it seems like a good way to get input for use in my program. I have an XML file i made that contains a list of houses and there peramaters, like so:

<house>
    <Price>400000</price>
    <neighborhood>BrentWood</neighborhood>
    <description>This is a so and so house, located...</description>
</house>
<house>
    <Price>300000</price>
    <neighborhood>BrentWood</neighborhood>
    <description>This is a so and so house, located...</description>
</house>

And i have a house class like so:

public class house{
    public house(int price, string neighborhood, string description){
        this.price = price;
        this.neighborhood = neighborhood;
        this.description = description;
    }
    public int price;
    public string neighborhood;
    public string description;
}

I have read a little about xml, but i cant seems to find a tutorial to make a function that takes the xml file as input, and returns a List of newly created house objects. Can anyone show me how this is done? Or maybe suggest a better way of defining the house objects in a file, and loading them as house objects?

Answer 1

This should get you started using LINQ to XML:

XDocument housesXml = XDocument.Load("houses.xml");

List<House> houses =
    housesXml.Root.Elements("house")
    .Select(h => new House(
        int.Parse(h.Element("price").Value),
        (string) h.Element("neighborhood"),
        (string) h.Element("description")
    ))
    .ToList();

(Also, wrap your <house> elements in an outer <houses></houses> root tag, and take care to match case, <Price></price> should be <price></price>)