Question

I am writing a custom WebDAV server in C#. One of the client test programs I am using is NetDrive and it claims and appears to be a WebDAV compliant client. My problem is I am receiving a request on the server in the following format:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<propfind xmlns="DAV:">
    <allprop/>
</propfind>

But other clients do this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<D:propfind xmlns:D="DAV:">
    <D:allprop/>
</D:propfind>

The two different namespace formats keep on fooing up my logic to look for the “allprop” element. My code looks a bit like this:

string xml = "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-8\"?><propfind xmlns=\"DAV:\"><allprop/></propfind>"; //Hardcode to make all the StackOverflow users' lives easier
XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument(new StringReader(xml));
XPathNavigator nav = doc.CreateNavigator();
XPathNodeIterator it = nav.Select("/propfind/*");

Now, I know I need to put in some type of namespace manager for the “DAV:”, so I tried this:

XmlNamespaceManager nsman = new XmlNamespaceManager(nav.NameTable);
nsman.AddNamespace("", "DAV");
XPathNodeIterator it = nav.Select("/propfind/*", nsman);

But I’m getting no nodes in my iterator for the first XML file. It seems the default namespace isn’t working like I thought it should.

What am I doing wrong? How do I query this XML for the existence of an allprop node when the namespace may be the default, or may be explicitly named?

Answer 1

I ended up looking for the namespace URI (DAV:) and adding it if it didn’t exist. Then I just did a namespace-qualified SELECT and it worked in all my test cases:

XPathDocument document = new XPathDocument(xml);
XPathNavigator navigator = document.CreateNavigator();

//Get namespaces & add them to the search
bool hasDAV = false;
string davPrefix = "D";
XmlNamespaceManager nsman = new XmlNamespaceManager(navigator.NameTable);

foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> nskvp in navigator.GetNamespacesInScope(XmlNamespaceScope.All))
{
    if (string.Compare(nskvp.Value, "DAV:", StringComparison.InvariantCultureIgnoreCase) == 0)
    {
        hasDAV = true;
        davPrefix = nskvp.Key;
    }
    nsman.AddNamespace(nskvp.Key, nskvp.Value);
}

if (!hasDAV)
    nsman.AddNamespace(davPrefix , "DAV:");


XPathNodeIterator iterator = navigator.Select("/" + davPrefix + ":" + WebDavXML.PropFind + "/*", nsman);