Question

I’m new to Web Services and XML and was tasked to parse an XML response packet returned.

What’s the best way to parse an XML result in C#.NET?

I need to bind to a data grid as the end result from a search query.

Answer 1

If you have access to the wsdl for the webservice, there is a utility wsdl that will generate the needed classes and deserialization to call a webservice and parse its response into those classes.

Using the example webservice at w3schools, you would just run this command line:

wsdl 'http://www.w3schools.com/webservices/tempconvert.asmx?WSDL' 

That would generate a file TempConvert.cs that you could add into your project. Then calling the webservice is just a matter of calling the generated functions:

Double fahrenheit = 32.2; TempConvert tempConverter = new TempConvert(); string Celcius = tempConverter.FahrenheitToCelsius(fahrenheit.ToString()); 

That TempConvert class takes care of the details of building an XML query, contacting the webservice, and parsing the reply back in. This is a super-simple example, so you only get a string back, but since your webservice is likely to be a little more complicated, you’ll get back more complicated classes containing the data you want in a parsed form. Depending on the complexity of the web service, this could even be as simple as an array of strings, or as complex as a giant class heirarchy.