Question

I get a null exception on this because MYTAG1 doesn’t exist. I understand that this is because Element(“MYTAG1”) is null and calling Elements(“MYTAG2”) on it wont work.

How do I deal with this to prevent the crash?

     var myItems = from myNode in Nodes.Element("MYTAG1").Elements("MYTAG2")
                           select new EPTableItem
                           {
                           //    Assign stuff here                            
                           };

Answer 1

I can’t think of a clever way to incorporate an if statement into the C# query syntax, so I’ll propose the following solution which checks for the required node before executing the query.

var myItems;
XElement myTag1 = myNode.Element("MYTAG1");

if (myTag1 != null)
{
    myItems = from myNode in myTag1.Elements("MYTAG2")  
              select new EPTableItem  
              {  
                  //    Assign stuff here                              
              };  
}