Question

I am trying to deserialize a XML, however I am having a lot of problems with the List object that I am using.

The XML is the following:

<EntriesSerialize>
    <Entries>
        <Entry file="myFile"
        value="2000" />
        <Entry file="myFile"
        value="400" />
        <Entry file="myFile"
        value="200" />
    </Entries>
</EntriesSerialize>

My classes are:

[XmlType("Entry")]
public class Entry
{
    public Entry()
    {

    }

    [XmlAttribute("file")]
    public string File { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("value")]
    public string Value { get; set; }

 }

[XmlType("EntriesSerialize")]
public class EntriesSerialize
{
    public EntriesSerialize()
    {
        EntriesList = new List<Entry>();
    }

    [XmlElement("Entries")]
    public List<Entry> EntriesList { get; set; }

}

The code that I am using to deserialize this XML is:

public static T Deserialize<T>(string content)
{
    byte[] byteArray = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(content);
    MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);
    StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);

    XmlSerializer serializer;
    serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));

    T model = (T)serializer.Deserialize(reader);
    reader.Close();

    return model;
}

The method that I call in the deserialization is the Deserialize(string content) like this:

EntriesSerialize temp = Deserialize<EntriesSerialize>(data);

However when I look at the temp variable using the C# debugger, I see that there is only one element inside the EntriesList object and that this element has its file and value attributes as null.

Note: the serialization of those classes works as expected.

Answer 1

The attribute(s) on EntriesList should be:

[XmlArray("Entries"), XmlArrayItem("Entry")]
public List<Entry> EntriesList { get; set; }

Your current syntax with [XmlElement("Entries")] is configured for:

<EntriesSerialize>
    <Entries file="myFile" value="2000" />
    <Entries file="myFile" value="400" />
    <Entries file="myFile" value="200" />
</EntriesSerialize>

(for info, neither of the [XmlType("...")] attributes are used in this scenario, but they don’t do any harm either)