Question

I have a CRM entity XML message as follows:

<c:KeyValuePairOfstringanyType xmlns:c="ns1" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"  >
....
 <c:value i:type="**b:AliasedValue**" **xmlns:b="ns3"**>
 SomethingHere...
 </c:value>
</c:KeyValuePairOfstringanyType>

Then I deserialized it to an object and serialized back to xml
I get

<c:KeyValuePairOfstringanyType xmlns:c="ns1" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-   instance"  >
 <c:value i:type="b:AliasedValue" >
 SomethingHere...
</c:value>
</c:KeyValuePairOfstringanyType>

I loose the xmlns:b definition.
Any idea why?

Answer 1

forty-two is right: attribute values do not carry any default semantics, so the namespace usage isn’t recognized as such by xml processors.

if you wish to refer to some b-data in your i:type-attribute, you my use a mapping element to associate c:value with a (hypothesized) b:value, i.e.:

<mapping xml:id="idXY'/>
...
<c:value c:ref="idXY">...</c:value>
...
<b:value b:ref="idXY">...</b:value>
...

… where you would declare _:ref as IDREF attributes in the respective xml schemas. you may have to adjust the design for 1:n-/m:n – mappings e.g. by having referrers as child elements of _:value.

best regards, carsten