Question

I’m having trouble parsing the following soap response. This is my first time working with LINQ and must examples I’ve found use XML and not a SOAP envelope. How do I get the values of the different “items”. I know there are different options (using add service reference) but it is not an option in my current project.

<SOAP-ENV:Envelope 
xmlns:SOAP-ENV=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/\" 
xmlns:ns1=\"http://random.com/api/1/service\" 
xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" 
xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" 
xmlns:ns2=\"http://xml.apache.org/xml-soap\" 
xmlns:SOAP-ENC=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/\" 
SOAP-ENV:encodingStyle=\"http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/\">
   <SOAP-ENV:Body>
       <ns1:getBeatlesResponse>
           <return xsi:type=\"ns2:Map\">
               <item>
                   <key xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">error</key>
                   <value xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">OK</value>
               </item>
               <item>
                   <key xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">Beatles</key>
                   <value xsi:type=\"ns2:Map\">
                       <item>
                           <key xsi:type=\"xsd:int\">9</key>
                           <value xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">John Lennon</value>
                       </item>
                       <item>
                           <key xsi:type=\"xsd:int\">12</key>
                           <value xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">Paul McCartney</value>
                       </item>
                       <item>
                           <key xsi:type=\"xsd:int\">25</key>
                           <value xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">George Harrison</value>
                       </item>
                       <item>
                           <key xsi:type=\"xsd:int\">184</key>
                           <value xsi:type=\"xsd:string\">Ringo Starr</value>
                       </item>
                   </value>
               </item>
           </return>
       </ns1:getBeatlesResponse>
   </SOAP-ENV:Body>
</SOAP-ENV:Envelope>

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

this one is pretty tricky because you have items that have items which probably could have items too… so if you do something like this

var returnResult = (from r in document.Descendants("item")
                            select r).ToList();

you will get all the items separated and one which has all the values in one…

edit:

this works somewhat fine

XDocument document = XDocument.Load(@"XMLFile1.xml");

        List<Item> items = new List<Item>();

        var returnResult = (from r in document.Descendants("item")
                            select r).ToList();

        foreach (XElement xElement in returnResult)
        {

            Item item = new Item();

            item.Key = xElement.Element("key") != null ? xElement.Element("key").Value : "";
            item.Value = xElement.Element("value") != null ? xElement.Element("value").Value : "";

            items.Add(item);
        }

        //sort the list to get the one that have the rest to the end
        var sorted = (from s in items
                      orderby s.Value.Length ascending
                      select s).ToList();

        List<Item> finalList = new List<Item>();

        items.Clear();
        for (int i = 0; i < sorted.Count - 1; i++)
        {
            for (int j = 1; j < sorted.Count; j++)
            {
                if (sorted[j].Value.Contains(sorted[i].Value) &&
                    sorted[j].Value.Length > sorted[i].Value.Length)
                {
                    Item itm = new Item();
                    itm.Key = sorted[j].Key;
                    KeyValuePair<string, string> kvp = new KeyValuePair<string, string>(sorted[i].Key,sorted[i].Value);
                    itm.Items.Add(kvp);
                    items.Add(itm);

                }
                else
                {
                    if (!finalList.Contains(sorted[i]))
                        finalList.Add(sorted[i]);
                }
            }
        }
class Item
{
    public List<Item> Items { get; set; }
    public string Key { get; set; }
    public string Value {get;set;}
    public Item()
    {
        Items = new List<Item>();
    }
}

you can now see all sub items with their correct key… only the ok/error is making some trouble… but you can get them from the final list and pick them if they are not any of the key-value pairs…

hope this helps