Question

Is there any way to deserialize elements containing either simple text or subelement to a string with XmlSerializer?

Xml sample:

<Attribute>
    <AttributeValue xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:type="xs:string">thisistext</AttributeValue>
    <AttributeValue>
        <e:Authorities xmlns:e="urn:dummy">
            <e:Authority>ORG_CHIEF</esia-encoder:Authority>
        </e:Authorities>
    </AttributeValue>
</Attribute>

C# property:

[XmlElement("AttributeValue", IsNullable = true)]
public string[] AttributeValue { get; set; }

Deserialization of the first AttributeValue succeed, but the next one fails. No wonder, beacause ReadElementString method expects simple or empty content. I’m looking for a way to tell to serializer “put content of this element to a string, whatever it contains”.

Answer 1

Actually, the 2nd value you have in your XML is:

 <e:Authorities xmlns:e="urn:dummy">
     <e:Authority>ORG_CHIEF</esia-encoder:Authority>
 </e:Authorities>

This is no valid string dataType which is expected because of:

public string[] AttributeValue {get; set;}