Question

I have used XmlDocument before to generate basic Xml before, however I am struggling to recreate the following XML via code. The main problem seems to be around adding the namespaces to the description section.

How do I create the following example XML file?

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<pndsdc:description
         xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
         xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
         xmlns:pndsterms="http://purl.org/mla/pnds/terms/"
         xmlns:pndsdc="http://purl.org/mla/pnds/pndsdc/"
         xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
         xsi:schemaLocation="http://purl.org/mla/pnds/pndsdc/
                             http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/pns/pndsdcxml/2005-06-13/xmls/pndsdc.xsd"
>
    <dc:identifier encSchemeURI="http://purl.org/dc/terms/URI">http://example.org/my/docs/12345/</dc:identifier>
    <dc:title xml:lang="en">Everything you wanted to know about identity, but were afraid to ask</dc:title>
    <dc:description xml:lang="en">The article provides a summary of the 2003 White Paper on identity cards for the UK
    with a critique from the perspective of several national and international civil liberties organisations.</dc:description>
    <dc:subject>Identity cards</dc:subject>
    <dc:subject>Civil liberties</dc:subject>

    <dc:subject>Human rights</dc:subject>
    <dc:type encSchemeURI="http://purl.org/dc/terms/DCMIType" valueURI="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text">Text</dc:type>
    <dcterms:license valueURI="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/uk/" />
    <dcterms:rightsHolder>The National Campaign Against Identity Cards</dcterms:rightsHolder>
    <dcterms:spatial encSchemeURI="http://purl.org/dc/terms/TGN">World, Europe, United Kingdom</dcterms:spatial>
</pndsdc:description>

Code can also be found here online.

Answer 1

Don’t worry about creating namespace declarations. Just make sure that every element that you create is in the right namespace. The XmlDocument will create the namespace declarations for you. So:

string pdnsdcUri = "http://purl.org/mla/pnds/pndsdc/";
string dcUri = "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
...
XmlDocument d = new XmlDocument();
XmlElement description = d.CreateElement("pdnsdc", "description", pdnsdcUri);
d.AddChild(description);
XmlElement identifier = d.CreateElement("dc", "identifier", dcUri);
description.AddChild(identifier);

and so on. It’s usually easier to create a Dictionary<string, string> containing the namespaces keyed by prefix, and then do something like:

XmlElement foo = d.CreateElement("prefix", "name", namespaces[prefix]);