Question

My head is fuzzled with this. I have an xml doc which has the layout for a grid stored in it. If you notice the columns are stored as “Items” in the XML. I am trying to retrieve each “Item” out of the XML using LINQ but no matter what I do I keep taking on straggler properties that I don’t need. Any help would be much appreciated.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16" ?> 
     <DatagridView>
        <ViewType>DevExpress.XtraGrid.Views.Grid.GridView</ViewType> 
           <ViewLayout> 
             <property name="Columns" iskey="true" value="9">
                <property name="Item1" isnull="true" iskey="true">
                   <property name="VisibleIndex">0</property> 
                   <property name="Visible">true</property> 
                   <property name="Width">1249</property> 
                   <property name="SummaryItem" isnull="true" iskey="true">
                      <property name="SummaryType">Count</property> 
                      <property name="DisplayFormat">{0}</property> 
                      <property name="FieldName">Comments</property> 
                      <property name="Tag" isnull="true" /> 
                   </property>
                   <property name="Name">colComments</property> 
                   <property name="ColumnEditName" /> 
                   <property name="FieldName">Comments</property> 
                </property>
                <property name="Item2" isnull="true" iskey="true">
                   <property name="VisibleIndex">1</property> 
                   <property name="Visible">true</property> 
                   <property name="Width">197</property> 
                   <property name="Name">colEvent</property> 
                   <property name="ColumnEditName" /> 
                   <property name="FieldName">Event</property> 
                </property>
                ......

EDIT:

To be clear, the XML can contain any number of columns represented like so:

            <property name="Item2" isnull="true" iskey="true">
               <property name="VisibleIndex">1</property> 
               <property name="Visible">true</property> 
               <property name="Width">197</property> 
               <property name="Name">colEvent</property> 
               <property name="ColumnEditName" /> 
               <property name="FieldName">Event</property> 
            </property>

I would like to grab those chunks of data in that same order via XML.

Answer 1

Well, you could just get the property elements directly beneath “Columns”:

// TODO: Work out what to do if there are zero or multiple such elements
var columns = xdoc.Descendants("property")
                  .Where(x => (string) x.Attribute("name") == "Columns")
                  .Single();

var items = columns.Elements("property");

foreach (var item in items)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Item {0}", (string) item.Attribute("name"));
    foreach (var property in items.Elements("property"))
    {
        Console.WriteLine("  {0} = {1}", (string) item.Attribute("name"),
                          (string) item);
    }
}