Question

Whitin a “units” element can be many “unit” elements which again have a “units” element.

I want to write the unitName of each unit into a custom class with prop UnitName AND the unitName of the previous/parent unit into the prop ParentUnitName.

I am also unsure what type of data the recursive method should return… best would be a List with a flat list.

How would you do that?

<units>
  <unit>
    <unitName>Test05</unitName>    
    <units>
      <unit>
        <unitName>Test03</unitName>        
        <units>
          <unit>
            <unitName>Test04</unitName>           
            <units>
              <unit>
                <unitName>Test07</unitName>                
                <units>
                  <unit>
                    <unitName>Test01</unitName>                    
                  </unit>
                </units>
              </unit>
            </units>
          </unit>
        </units>
      </unit>
    </units>
  </unit>
</units>

Answer 1

Have a look at the XDocument class.

It has a variety of methods available to help with parsing Xml easily. In your case it would look something like:

var xdoc = new XDocument(xmlString);
foreach(XElement node in xdoc.Descendants("unitName"))
{
  AddToList(node.value);
}

This will iterate through all unitName elements in the xml document and you can do whatever you want with them.

Edit: Changed xdoc.Descendants to xdoc.Elements, so it works recursively now and yields the expected results.