Question

I have 290 Group Policy Backup xml files which I need to enumerate in separate folders.

With each Group Policy backup xml file, I need to query the Policy settings.

Anyone who’s looked at a Group Policy xml backup file before would know they’re chock-a-block full of Namespace declarations.

I want to know, using Linq to XML, as I query each xml file, how can I dynamically query the XML the Namespace and then append the Namespace into the Linq query for the child nodes/values?

Here are some examples of the xml structure.

  <User>
    <ExtensionData>
      <Extension xmlns:q1="http://www.microsoft.com/GroupPolicy/Settings/Scripts" xsi:type="q1:Scripts">
        <q1:Script>


    <ExtensionData>
      <Extension xmlns:q1="http://www.microsoft.com/GroupPolicy/Settings/IE" xsi:type="q1:InternetExplorerSettings">
        <q1:PreferenceMode>true</q1:PreferenceMode>


    <ExtensionData>
      <Extension xmlns:q2="http://www.microsoft.com/GroupPolicy/Settings/Registry" xsi:type="q2:RegistrySettings">
        <q2:Policy>
          <q2:Name>Disable changing accessibility settings</q2:Name>
          <q2:State>Enabled</q2:State>


    <ExtensionData>
      <Extension xmlns:q1="http://www.microsoft.com/GroupPolicy/Settings/DriveMaps" xsi:type="q1:DriveMapSettings">
        <q1:DriveMapSettings clsid="{8FDDCC1A-0C3C-43cd-A6B4-71A6DF20DA8C}">

My initial code looks like this:

Dim NS As XNamespace = "http://www.microsoft.com/GroupPolicy/Settings"
NodeValue = XDoc.Descendants(NS + NodeName).First().Value

As you can see I’m going to face literally dozens of different Namespaces, at this stage I don’t even know what they all are.

My end-task is to trawl through 290 directories, each containing one Group Policy xml backup file. I then need to read the Policy Name from each of the settings contained within the backup file.

Because I don’t know what Policy settings each xml flie will contain, I don’t know what Namespace(s) I need to use when attempting to read the xml values. Each xml file may even contain multiple namespaces.

How do I dynamically read the Namespace in Linq so I can read the values?

Thanks

Answer 1

Here’s what I ended up with:

Dim ListOfNamespaces = z.Root.DescendantsAndSelf.Attributes().Where(Function(a) a.IsNamespaceDeclaration).GroupBy(Function(a) If(a.Name.[Namespace] = XNamespace.None, [String].Empty, a.Name.LocalName), Function(a) XNamespace.[Get](a.Value)).ToDictionary(Function(g) g.Key, Function(g) g.First())