Question

I want to create a custom XML structure as follows:

<Hotels>
    <Hotel />
</Hotels>

I’ve created an implementation of List just to be able to do this. My code is as follows:

[XmlRootAttribute(ElementName="Hotels")]
public class HotelList: List<HotelBasic>

Because the class that List holds is not named Hotel but HotelBasic my xml is like

<Hotels>
   <HotelBasic />
</Hotels>

How do I fix this without having to implement ISerializable or IEnumerable?

Answer 1

Assuming you are using XmlSerializer, if all you want to do is change how your HotelBasic class is serialized, you can use XmlTypeAttribute:

[XmlType(TypeName = "Hotel")]
public class HotelBasic
{
    public string Name { get; set; }
}

When used with your HotelList class it will be serialized as:

<Hotels xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Hotel>
    <Name>One</Name>
  </Hotel>
  <Hotel>
    <Name>Two</Name>
  </Hotel>
</Hotels>