Question

I’m trying to create a class which I can serialize to produce the following XML:

<chart palette='1'>   <categories>     <category label='2001' />     <category label='2002' /> 

..etc

I have a class which look something like this:

[XmlRoot('chart')] public class Chart {             [XmlAttributeAttribute('palette')]     public string Palette;      [XmlElement('categories')]     public List<Category> Categories = new List<Category>(); }  [XmlRoot('category')] public class Category {     [XmlAttributeAttribute('label')]     public string Label; } 

However, this does not produce the desired chart->categories->category@label structure. The XmlRoot on the Category class doesn’t seem to be used. Here is the output I have from that code:

 <chart palette='2'>   <categories label='2002' />   </chart> 

How can I get the XML structure I want?

Answer 1

Use XmlArrayAttribute and XmlArrayItemAttribute

[XmlRoot('chart')] public class Chart {             [XmlAttributeAttribute('palette')]     public string Palette;      [XmlArray('categories')]     [XmlArrayItem('category')]     public List<Category> Categories = new List<Category>(); }   public class Category {     [XmlAttributeAttribute('label')]     public string Label; } 

Sometimes is can be useful to just create the xml structure you want, and then use xsd.exe to generate classes from it. This has to be done in a 2-step process, first generating an xsd file, and then classes from that.

xsd.exe something.xml xsd.exe something.xsd /classes 

This will probably not give the exact result you want (unless you have a really good xsd, and don’t just generate it from the xml), but does give some ideas