Question

I’m using KissXML on iOS to parse the XML data returned from a wcf REST web service (written in c#)

The trouble I have is that KissXML doesn’t like the namespace in the XML data that I get from the web service.

In a trivial example the XML data I get looks like this:

<ArrayOfItem  xmlns="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/DataUpdateService" xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><Item>Test</Item></ArrayOfItem>

KissXML can’t seem to use xpath to parse this XML

resultNodes = [xmlDoc nodesForXPath:@"//Item" error:&error];

If I remove the default namespace from the XML string – then it works fine.

<ArrayOfItem xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"><Item>Test</Item></ArrayOfItem>

So this XML is fine and using the objective-c above I get 1 object in my array (as expected).

So the question is: What should I be doing about this? I have control of both the service and the iOS app so I can either change the service to try to remove or change the namespace (pointers to how to do this appreciated), or I can rip it out of my string once I get the data to the phone.

Both of these options feel a bit like a hack – are there better options?

Answer 1

I would recommend changing the defaultOutgoingResponseFormat to Json,
and handling it instead of xml.

Why? read here:
http://www.json.org/xml.html

and also it will solve your problem 🙂