Question

I have a following XML (part of a .rdl report):

<Report xmlns:rd="http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQLServer/reporting/reportdesigner" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition">
  <DataSources>
    <DataSource Name="TMSSharepointDataSource">
      <DataSourceReference>TMSSharepointDataSource</DataSourceReference>
      <rd:DataSourceID>f06ffa33-238f-4d83-adfe-1eaa8df96e90</rd:DataSourceID>
    </DataSource>
  </DataSources>
</Report>

I try to parse and read it using following code:

byte[] fileContent = File.ReadAllBytes(@"path");
            UTF8Encoding unicode = new UTF8Encoding();
            string stringContent = unicode.GetString(fileContent);

            XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(stringContent);
            XElement dsNode = xml.Root.Element("DataSources");

I can’t figure out why is dsNode always null?

Answer 1

It’s a namespace issue… you need to specify the namespace for the DataSources element. Fortunately, LINQ to XML makes this really easy:

XNamespace ns = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/sqlserver/" + 
        "reporting/2008/01/reportdefinition";
XElement dsNode = xml.Root.Element(ns + "DataSources");

Note the xmlns="http://..." part of the root element, which means that element and all elements below it which don’t have an explicit namespace inherit that namespace.