Question

I have an object graph serialized to xaml. A rough sample of what it looks like is:

<MyObject xmlns.... >     <MyObject.TheCollection>         <PolymorphicObjectOne .../>         <HiImPolymorphic ... />     </MyObject.TheCollection> </MyObject> 

I want to use Linq to XML in order to extract the serialized objects within the TheCollection.

Note: MyObject may be named differently at runtime; I’m interested in any object that implements the same interface, which has a public collection called TheCollection that contains types of IPolymorphicLol.

The only things I know at runtime are the depth at which I will find the collection and that the collection element is named “*.TheCollection`. Everything else will change.

The xml will be retrieved from a database using Linq; if I could combine both queries so instead of getting the entire serialized graph and then extracting the collection objects I would just get back the collection that would be sweet.

Answer 1

Will,

It is not possible to find out whether an object implements some interface by looking at XAML.
With constraints given you can find xml element that has a child named .

You can use following code: It will return all elements having child element which name ends with .TheCollection

    static IEnumerable<XElement> FindElement(XElement root)     {         foreach (var element in root.Elements())         {             if (element.Name.LocalName.EndsWith('.TheCollection'))             {                 yield return element.Parent;             }             foreach (var subElement in FindElement(element))             {                 yield return subElement;             }         }     } 

To make sure that object represented by this element implements some interface you need to read metadata from your assemblies. I would recommend you to use Mono.Cecil framework to analyze types in your assemblies without using reflection.