Question

I’m trying to deserialize an XML document, one of its nodes can be represented like this :

<n1 zone="00000" id="0000" />

or this :

<n2 zone="00000" id="0000" />

or this :

<n3 zone="00000" id="0000" />

In my document I will always have one “n1” node or one “n2” node or one “n3” node. I’d like to deserialize all these fragments into an instance of this class :

[Serializable]
public class N
{
    [XmlAttribute("zone")]
    public string Zone { get; set; }

    [XmlAttribute("id")]
    public string Id { get; set; }
}

But I didn’t manage to do that. The documentation suggests to use the XmlChoiceIdentifier attribute in order to accomplish this, but maybe I used it in a wrong way.

Any idea ?

PS : I know I can create three classes : N1, N2 and N3, and map them to my different types of XML fragments. But I’d prefer a cleaner solution.

Answer 1

Here is a fairly understandable read on how to use XmlChoiceIdentifier:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc164135.aspx

If you are really having trouble with this, then you could always use an XSL transform to do the mapping first.