Question

So lately I have been using this method to return a string:

string uri = "http://localhost:8000/Service/Student";
XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Load(uri);
var studentcollection = xDoc.Descendants("Student")
    .Select(n => new
    {
      FirstName = n.Element("FirstName").Value,
    })
    .ToList();

And it works fine, but if one of the values from the webservice is a byte[] will this method return that value? If not, how would you combine that method (because im use to it) and return a byte[]?

Answer 1

Are you saying that one of the elements could return a byte[] or is it really a base 64 encoded string representing a byte[]? If the latter, you can extract the bytes from the value:

byte[] decoded = Convert.FromBase64String(value);

Full code:

string uri = "http://localhost:8000/Service/Student";
XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Load(uri);
var studentcollection = xDoc.Descendants("Student")
    .Select(Convert.FromBase64String(n.Element("Picture").Value))
    .ToList();

Which will give you a list of byte[] extracted out of the ‘Picture’ element for each student (change code accordingly to create Picture as part of your student instance).