Question

I have a framgment of XML (just a few nodes, not a complete XML document) in a string that I need to get some values out of with Linq to XML. I’m finding it quite difficult to get this string into an XML object that I can work with though.

Is there a way for me to do this?

This is a sample of the XML:

<Batch type="My Funds" pageNumber="69">
  <FundGroup heading="Best Funds Ever">
    <fund id="367"/>
    <fund id="373"/>
    <fund id="378"/>
  </FundGroup>
  <FundGroup heading="Almost Best Funds">
    <fund id="665"/>
    <fund id="666"/>
    <fund id="667"/>
  </FundGroup>
</Batch>

Answer 1

The xml is intact, so any xml-model should work. XmlSerializer should be fine, for example; but how about an ad-hoc model of anonymous types?

        var doc = XElement.Parse(xml);
        var batch = new {
            Type = (string)doc.Attribute("type"),
            Page = (int)doc.Attribute("pageNumber"),
            Groups = (from fg in doc.Elements("FundGroup")
                      select new {
                          Heading = fg.Attribute("heading"),
                          Funds = (from fund in fg.Elements("fund")
                                   select (int)fund.Attribute("id")).ToList()
                      }).ToList()
        };

Now explore batch ;-p