Question

I want to read the xml elements dynamically (I mean without hard-coding the element name) from the xml file. I am not able to use the XmlReader.ReadToDescendant method as it expects a Local Name which in my case varies. For example in this case I need to read elements A, B, C, D & etc…

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<test Version="2010" xmlns="http://test.org/2010/values">
<A>
    <Data>
     <Somedata></Somedata>
    </Data>
    <Rows>
      <Row></Row>
      <Row></Row>
    </Rows>
</A>
<B>
    <Data>
     <Somedata></Somedata>
    </Data>
    <Rows>
      <Row></Row>
      <Row></Row>
    </Rows>
</B>
<C>
    <Data>
     <Somedata></Somedata>
    </Data>
    <Rows>
      <Row></Row>
      <Row></Row>
    </Rows>
</C>
<D>
    <Data>
     <Somedata></Somedata>
    </Data>
    <Rows>
      <Row></Row>
      <Row></Row>
    </Rows>
</D>
</test>

Please help me.

Answer 1

That’s pretty simple:

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("test.xml");
string name = GetNameFromWherever();
foreach (XElement match in doc.Descendants(name))
{
    ...
}

That’s using LINQ to XML – a lovely API for XML if you’re using .NET 3.5 or later… it’s much nicer than using XmlReader.