Question

I have only one namespace in my XML file, defined on the root element.

<root xmlns="http://my-namespace">
    <aChild>
        <secondChild />
    ...

Is it possible to avoid writing it before each element of my xpath expression ?
After doing

xmlNamespaceManager.AddNamespace("ns", "http://my-namespace");

I have to write

xml.SelectNodes("ns:root/ns:aChild/ns:secondChild", xmlNamespaceManager);

And it would be much easier to do just

xml.SelectNodes("ns:root/aChild/secondChild", xmlNamespaceManager);

I have developpers who send xpath expressions to the XML but they don’t necessarily know the prefix or the namespace, they just know they have to access root/aChild/secondChild.

Thank you.

Answer 1

Unfortunately as intuitive as it seems, there’s no easy way do define the default namespace in XPath. An XPath name without a namespace declaration binds to the null namespace, rather than the URI assigned to the default namespace.

This is discussed in XPath default namespace handling and Easy things should be Easy