Question

I haven’t been able to find a question related to my specific problem.

What I am trying to do is take a list of Xml nodes, and directly deserialize them to a List without having to create a class with attributes.

So the xml (myconfig.xml) would look something like this…

<collection>  
    <item>item1</item>
    <item>item2</item>
    <item>item3</item>
    <item>etc...</item>
</collection>  

In the end I would like a list of items as strings.

The code would look like this.

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer( typeof( List<string> ) );
using (XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create( "myconfig.xml" )
{
    List<string> itemCollection = (List<string>)serializer.Deserialize( reader );
}

I’m not 100% confident that this is possible, but I’m guessing it should be. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Are you married to the idea of using a serializer? If not, you can try Linq-to-XML. (.NET 3.5, C# 3 [and higher])

Based on your provided XML file format, this is the simple code.

// add 'using System.Xml.Linq' to your code file
string file = @"C:\Temp\myconfig.xml";
XDocument document = XDocument.Load(file);
List<string> list = (from item in document.Root.Elements("item")
                     select item.Value)
                    .ToList();