Question

My XML is given below.

<UrlRoutes>
  <ActivityPR>
     <Source>activity/editactivity</Source>
     <DestinationController>Activity</DestinationController>
     <DestinationAction>Editactivity</DestinationAction>  
  </ActivityPR>
  <UserSettings>
     <Source>settings/subscriptions</Source>
     <DestinationController>UserSettings</DestinationController>
     <DestinationAction>GetUserPreferenceSettings</DestinationAction>
  </UserSettings>
</UrlRoutes>

I will have Source element value in a var say sourceX . Ex

SourceX = "settings/subscriptions" 

or

SourceX = "activity/editactivity"

I am trying to get the parent node using the below code, let me know if there is something wrong

XmlElement xmlNode = xmlDoc.GetElementById(SourceX);
XmlNode parent = xmlNode.ParentNode;

Now for the combination for the parent node(say ActivityPR or Usersettings) and Source, I have to find the corresponding DestinationController and DestinationAction.

How do I do that? Prefer traditional XML as opposed to LINQ as rest of the code is in that form.

if(node!=null)
        {
            XmlElement routeElement = (XmlElement)node;


            strController = routeElement.GetElementsByTagName("DestinationController")[0].InnerText.ToString();
            strAction = routeElement.GetElementsByTagName("DestinationAction")[0].InnerText.ToString();


        }

Answer 1

I’m assuming you’ve already loaded the XML into your XmlDocument – correct?

In that case, you should be able to use something like this:

string xpath = string.Format("/UrlRoutes/*[Source='{0}']", sourceX);
XmlNode node = xmlDoc.SelectSingleNode(xpath);

if(node != null)
{
    // use the node to do whatever you need to do
}

The xpath expression basically selects any node under /UrlRoutes that contains a <Source> element with the given string as its value. This means: the values of <Source> need to be unique.

Update: if you know you want to search only inside nodes <UserSettings>, you can make your XPath expression more selective:

string parentNode = "UserSettings";
string sourceX = "settings/subscriptions";

string xpath = string.Format("/UrlRoutes/{0}[Source='{1}']", parentNode, sourceX);

But with this more selective XPath, you would not be able to find a node when you have sourceX = "activity/editactivity" in your example (since that is not inside a <UserSettings> node)

Update #2: I would probably use this code to grab the elements inside your node:

if(node != null)
{
   string dc = node.SelectSingleNode("DestinationController").InnerXml;
   string da = node.SelectSingleNode("DestinationAction").InnerXml;
}

That way, you don’t need to convert to an XmlElement first.