Question

What is best way to search in XML document to retrieve one or more records against search criteria. Suggestions are welcomed.

Answer 1

Personally I’d use LINQ to XML if you possibly can. Your question is very vague at the moment, but for example, you could write:

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("test.xml");
var matches = doc.Descendants("Person")
                 .Where(x => (string) x.Attribute("Name") == "Jon")
                 .Where(x => x.Elements("Child").Count() >= 2);

While you can use XPath, I generally prefer not to – it has all the normal problems of embedding one language within another, whereas using LINQ to XML you’re using C# throughout, so you have no new syntax to learn – just the relevant methods within the LINQ to XML library.

LINQ to XML also makes namespace handling simple, and you don’t need to worry about escaping values etc, as your query is all in code rather than in a string.