Question

I’m trying to take XML and display two comboboxes. The first combobox will contain a distinct list (i.e., no duplicates) from the provinceCode elements. The second combobox will show only nameEN elements matching the provinceCode. Here is a sample of my XML:

<siteList>
  <site code="s0000001">
    <nameEn>Edmonton</nameEn>
    <provinceCode>AB</provinceCode>
  </site>
  <site code="s0000002">
    <nameEn>Vancouver</nameEn>
    <provinceCode>BC</provinceCode>
  </site>
...
</siteList>

I have my XDocument from this:

XDocument loaded = XDocument.Parse(strSiteList);

I’m struggling with how to extract the unique list of provinces. It’s something like:

var list = loaded.Descendants("provinceCode").Distinct;

but I’m new to C# and XDocument and I don’t know what type of variable to use so I get “Cannot assign method group to an implicitly-typed local variable”.

And I’m totally in the dark on how do to the comboboxes. I’ve done a quick search on stackoverflow and google, but there doesn’t seem to be anything relevant on both XDocument and dependent comboboxes in C#. Is using XDocument the wrong approach?

Thanks!

Answer 1

The problem is that you’re not actually calling the method. You could write:

var list = loaded.Descendants("provinceCode").Distinct();

Note the brackets.

but I don’t think that actually does what you want. I suspect you want:

List<string> list = loaded.Descendants("provinceCode")
                          .Select(x => x.Value)
                          .Distinct()
                          .ToList();

That will give you a list of distinct province codes as a list of strings.

It’s not quite clear what you mean about the second list – is that meant to match just a single province code? If so:

List<string> names = loaded.Descendants("site")
                .Where(x => x.Element("provinceCode").Value == provinceCode) 
                .Select(x => x.Element("nameEn").Value)
                .ToList();