Question

Is there a way to set the xmlroot of an object or class during runtime?

[XmlRoot("data")]
public class MyRoot {
    [XmlElement("bar")]
    public List<RemoteHost> Hosts {get;set;}
}

I don’t have the option of modifying the class MyRoot in this case; so, I would like to specify that I want the root name to be called “data” before I serialize the object to XML using XmlSerializer.

Answer 1

Yes! Simply:

var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(MyRoot),
    new XmlRootAttribute("data"));

Or more completely, see XmlAttributeOverrides. However, with either of these you must cache and reuse the serializer instance, otherwise you’ll leak assemblies.