Question

I have a class with a separate field for Email. Then I have fields as Email1, Email2, …, Email9

I receive values in the form of xml like this

<user Email="[e-mail]">
   <Contact Name="test1" Email="[e-mail]"/>
   <Contact Name="test2" Email="[e-mail]"/>
</user>

There can be no contact or up to nine contacts in a single user. How can I assign these values to my properties using linq?

Answer 1

For better design you should have an entity Contact in addition to your class User, so each user can have List<Contact> as you described like this:

public class User
{
    public List<Contact> Contacts { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
}

public class Contact
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public string Email { get; set; }
}

Then the linq query used to populate the class might be as follows:

XElement xmlDoc = XElement.Load(@"..\Users.xml");
var users = from x in xmlDoc.Elements()
            select new User
            {                
               Email = (string) x.Attribute("Email"),
               Contacts = new List<Contact>(
                          from c in x.Elements()
                          select new Contact
                          {
                              Name = (string) c.Attribute("Name"),
                              Email = (string) c.Attribute("Email")
                          }
               )
            };