Question

I have an XML document of the form:

<metadata>
      <item name="Name" type="xs:string" length="102"/>
      <item name="Email" type="xs:string" length="202"/>
</metadata>
<data>
    <row>
        <value>Daniel</value>
        <value>[e-mail]</value>
    </row>
    <row>
        <value>George</value>
        <value>[e-mail]</value>             
    </row>
</data>

The ordering and number of columns may change so it is not sufficient to assume //row/value[1]/text() always holds ‘Name’.

What is the best way to query the document using the metadata names to pull the right values?

I am querying the document in C#.NET3.5 so can use XDocument, XPath etc… whichever is the best for the job.

Answer 1

Personally, I would transform this input (is it plist?) into a “real” XML document where the tags have better names (i.e. the metadata description). You can achieve this by using xsl transformation and a selfwritten stylesheet (can assist if needed).

After that, you would have a structure like:

<data>
  <row>
    <Name>Daniel</Name>
    <Email>[e-mail]</Email>
  </row>
  <row>
    <Name>George</Name>
    <Email>[e-mail]</Email>
  </row>
</data>

Now then it’s easy to address the nodes using /data/row/Name and selecting them with an XPathNavigator