Question

I am having difficulty trying to return values from an XML file. Here is an example of the XML:

<xml>
  <item1>Whatever</item1>
  <video>
    <caption>Video Title</caption>
    <width>1280</width>
    <height>720</height>
  </video>
  <element1>Results One</element1>
  <element2>Results Two</element2>
</xml>

I am calling the data like this:

 XElement xmlData = XElement.Parse(e.Result);
 var list = new List<VideoUrl>();
 foreach (XElement item in xmlData.Elements("xml"))
 {
 var element1 = item.Element("element1").Value;
 var element2 = item.Element("element2").Value;

 list.Add(new VideoUrl
 {
    etc...
 });

and then assigning the data to a list box to return the values. Problem is I am trying to return XML items “element1” and “element2” but nothing is returned when i run the emulator. If I change the code to return Video > Caption it works fine. I feel like its something real simple I am missing. Any ideas or code samples to fix this would be much appreciated. Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

xmlData is the <xml> element, so xmlData.Elements("xml") will return no values – there are no xml elements directly under xmlData. Given that it’s the root, you know there’s only one node, so you can just do:

var element1 = (string) xmlData.Element("element1");
var element2 = (string) xmlData.Element("element2");

Note that by casting to string instead of using the Value property, you end up with a null reference if the element doesn’t exist, instead of an exception being thrown.