Question

I am having an issue getting the value of an XML, it is loading it in the XML document when i debug, but it is not finding the value or the node i want to access. Here is the xml. The value i want to get is “Active”. Now this XML is not a file or anything , is being passed as a string… (can not modify this part) have only access to the class where i can create functions to access it but can not modify the actual code getting the values and passing it as a “xml string”

<Clients>
  <BillingCycle>30</BillingCycle>
  <Category>1</Category>
  <Type>Admin</Type>
  <AddressCat>3</AddressCat>
  <ZipCodeCat>5</ZipCodeCat>
  <ClientManager>
    <UserID>5</UserID>
    <ZPVal>1</ZPVal>
    <DRY1>Test</DRY1>
    <Active>1</Active>
  </ClientManager>
</Clients>

C# code here

public bool IsActive(int ClientID, int VassID)
        {
            bool isActive = false;
            HelperClass helper = new HelperClass();
            XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();

            //at this point i can see the data was stored in the xml when debugging
            xml.LoadXml(helper.GetClientXML(ClientID, VassID));

           //have tried the following do not woerk
         //   XmlNode node = xml.SelectSingleNode ("/Clients/ClientManager/Active/text()");

            XmlNode node = xml.SelectSingleNode("Clients/ClientManager/Active");

            int isActiveVal = Convert.ToInt32(node.Value);

            if (isActiveVal == 1)
            {
                isActive = true;
            }

            return isActive;
        }

Answer 1

This line could work:

//XmlNode node = xml.SelectSingleNode ("/Clients/ClientManager/Active/text()");
var activeTextNodes = xml.SelectNodes("/Clients/ClientManager/Active/text()");

… but it will select a set of Active text() values, which you probably don’t want.

You could access the InnerText value of the node you found:

XmlNode node = xml.SelectSingleNode("Clients/ClientManager/Active");
int isActiveVal = Convert.ToInt32(node.InnerText);

Or you could access the value of the First Child:

XmlNode node = xml.SelectSingleNode("Clients/ClientManager/Active");
int isActiveVal = Convert.ToInt32(node.FirstChild.Value);

All this being said, you should use int.TryParse instead of Convert.ToInt32 because it won’t throw an exception on non-integer data.