Question

I am thinking I am doing something wrong here. I am using XDocument.Descendants to get a grandchild element of an xml file that I am trying to parse into an object. But I am getting a null value every time I attempt to run it.

IEnumerable<PatientClass> template = (IEnumerable<PatientClass>)(from templates in xDocument.Descendants("dataTemplateSpecification")
select new PatientClass
{
  PatientId = int.Parse(templates.Descendants("element").Single(el => el.Attribute("name").Value=="PatientId").ToString()),
  EMPIID = int.Parse(templates.Descendants("element").Single(el => el.Attribute("name").Value=="EMPIID").ToString())                  
});

Let us suppose that that was the extent of the linq query that I am using…

<dataTemplateSpecification id="id1" name="name1" >
<templates xmlns="">
<template>
  <elements>
    <element id="element0" name="PatientId" display="Patient ID" dataType="String" visable="true" readOnly="false" value="4563">
      <mapping path="//Template/TemplateData/ACOData/PATIENT_ID" />
    </element>
    <element id="element1" name="PopulationPatientID" display="Population Patient ID" dataType="String" visable="true" readOnly="true" enc="2098" value="6407">
      <mapping path="//Template/TemplateData/ACOData/POPULATION_PATIENT_ID" />
    </element>
    <element id="element2" name="EMPIID" display="EMPIID" dataType="String" visable="true" readOnly="true" value="">
      <mapping path="//Template/TemplateData/ACOData/EMPI" />
    </element>        
  </elements>
</template>
</templates>
</dataTemplateSpecification>

Let us suppose that that is the xml that I am using… now, would I need namespaces to get that above query to work? I hope not. that would mean that I would have to rewrite my xml… Which would really, really be rough for me.

Answer 1

I’m not really sure what you’re trying to do. It looks like you’re trying to parse an XML element to an integer. The below code works for me, but I had to give the element with name EMPIID an integer in the value attribute.

Please note, though, that there is probably a better way to do what you’re trying to do. I just tried to get as close to your original code as possible with my example.

var xel = System.Xml.Linq.XElement.Parse(xml);
var elements = xel.Descendants("elements");

var patients = elements.Select(e => new
{
    PatientID = int.Parse(e.Elements("element")
        .First(el => el.Attribute("name").Value == "PatientId")
        .Attribute("value").Value),
    EMPIID = int.Parse(e.Elements("element")
        .First(el => el.Attribute("name").Value == "EMPIID")
        .Attribute("value").Value)
});