Question

I’m posting to a web page which I was told took XML as it’s body. Turns out that what it really requires is what looks like a URL encoded CGI query string:

<FIRST>
  <ELEMENT1>Value1</ELEMENT1>
  <ELEMENT2>Value1</ELEMENT2>
  <ELEMENT3>Value1</ELEMENT3>
</FIRST>

<SECOND>
  <ELEMENT1>Value1</ELEMENT1>
  <ELEMENT2>Value1</ELEMENT2>
</SECOND>

Needs to be transmitted as

FIRST_ELEMENT1=VALUE1&FIRST_ELEMENT2=VALUE2&FIRST_ELEMENT3=VALUE3&SECOND_ELEMENT1=VALUE1&SECOND_ELEMENT2=VALUE2

The third party tells me this is a common usage, although I’ve not seen it before (as a method of submitting XML) it’s obvious that the service was designed to take an HTML POST with a form as the source of data.

While I can see how I could write a transform I’m wondering if there is a mthod in the .Net framwork which achieves this translation. Upto and including .Net 3.5 is available on this project.

Thanks in advance
Dave

Answer 1

I’ve never seen that usage, but something like:

var query = string.Join("&",(
            from parent in XElement.Parse(xml).Elements()
            from child in parent.Elements()
            select HttpUtility.UrlEncode(parent.Name.LocalName) + "_"
                 + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(child.Name.LocalName) + "="
                 + HttpUtility.UrlEncode(child.Value)).ToArray());