Question

I would like to deserialize a HTML table into an object. But with the following code, it expects to see <Rows> as the parent of <tr>‘s and <Cells> as the parent of <td>‘s. I want to keep this class structure. Am I missing any attribute declaration?

<table>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td></td>
    <td></td>
  </tr>
</table>

public class Table
{
    [XmlArrayItem("tr")]
    public List<Row> Rows { get; set; }
}

public class Row
{
    [XmlArrayItem("td")]
    public List<Cell> Cells { get; set; }
}

public class Cell
{
    public object Value { get; set; }
}

Answer 1

Try setting the attributes as shown below. Note that you’ll have to change the type of Value on the Cell class from object to string.

[XmlRoot("table")]
public class Table
{
    [XmlElement(typeof(Row), ElementName = "tr")]
    public List<Row> Rows { get; set; }
}

public class Row
{
    [XmlElement(typeof(Cell), ElementName = "td")]
    public List<Cell> Cells { get; set; }
}

public class Cell
{
    [XmlText(typeof(string))]
    public string Value { get; set; }
}