Question

I have a following xml with duplicate nodes named(“address”) and I need to deserialize these “address” nodes to one object:

<dealer id="8569" ed="0">
  <name hide="0">some name</name>
  <url>http://www.some.com</url>
  <address hide="0" />
  <address>
    <line1>text1</line1>
    <line2>text2</line2>
    <line3>text3</line3>
    <town>Town</town>
    <postcode>Postcode</postcode>
  </address>
</dealer>

I need to deserialize it to the following class:

public class Dealer
{
    public Dealer()
    {
        _address = new Address();
    }

    [XmlAttribute("id")]
    public long Id { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("name")]
    public string Name{ get; set; }

    [XmlElement("url")]
    public string Url{ get; set; }

    [XmlElement("address")]
    public Address Address{ get; set; }

}    
public class Address
{
    [XmlElement("line1")]
    public string Line1{ get; set; }

    [XmlElement("line2")]
    public string Line2 { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("line3")]
    public string Line3 { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("county")]
    public string County{ get; set; }

    [XmlElement("town")]
    public string Town{ get; set; }

    [XmlElement("postcode")]
    public string Postcode{ get; set; }
}

When this xml is deserialized to above class, it always gets the first “address” node, however, I need the second node to be picked up. How can I do this?

Answer 1

Short of changing your XML schema, all I can think of is having your Dealer class implement IXmlSerializable and implement the associated ReadXml method to use the desired xml node. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.serialization.ixmlserializable.readxml.aspx

Other than that, you could alter your Dealer.Address to be a collection/array of Address objects which are compatible to both representations then after deserialization ignore/remove the empty address from the collection.