VB.NET XML Linq Get Descendants

Question

I am trying to use LINQ to get the values of some child elements. Here's the XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
 <UserRecipes xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <recipe name="Chocolate" portions="5">
   <ingredient quantity="500" unit="g">Chocolate Bar</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="300" unit="g">Chocolate Buttons</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="250" unit="g">Hot Chocolate</ingredient> 
  </recipe>
  <recipe name="Cookies" portions="24">
   <ingredient quantity="4" unit="oz">Flour</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="200" unit="g">Chocolate Buttons</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="600" unit="g">Sugar</ingredient>
  </recipe>
  <recipe name="Cake" portions="22">
   <ingredient quantity="4" unit="oz">Flour</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="4" unit="oz">Sugar</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="4" unit="oz">Butter</ingredient>
   <ingredient quantity="60" unit="n/a">Eggs</ingredient>
</recipe>
</UserRecipes>

The idea of this is to be able to retrieve the ingredients used in a specific recipe. For example, if the user chooses "Chocolate", then it would retrieve all the ingredients used in the "chocolate" recipe - in this case: Chocolate Bar, Chocolate Buttons and Hot Chocolate.

However, currently, when I perform my LINQ query, it returns all these 3 values as one long string. Eg Chocolate BarChocolate ButtonsHot Chocolate. Which isn't very useful, because I need these separate to add to my datatable (later on).

Here is the VB.NET code I currently have:

Dim Doc As XDocument = XDocument.Load("G:\Computing\!Recipe Test\XMLTest.xml")
Dim LinqQuery As IEnumerable(Of XElement) = From element In Doc.Descendants
                                                Where element.@name = "Chocolate"
                                                Select element
For Each Ele In LinqQuery
   RichTextBox1.AppendText(Ele.Value & ControlChars.NewLine)
Next

Which returns

Chocolate BarChocolate ButtonsHot Chocolate

in the textbox.

How can I get it to return each value separately (and therefore put them on a new line)

Many thanks - hope this makes sense, it's my first time with XML! Alternative methods are also allowed, more than happy to listen to other ideas and techniques.

Answer 1

The problem is that you are selecting the recipe element rather than all of the ingredient elements. When you output the Value of a parent element, it simply concatenates the text values of all of it's children, which is what you are seeing.

One simple way to fix this is to change this line:

Dim LinqQuery As IEnumerable(Of XElement) = From element In Doc.Descendants
                                                Where element.@name = "Chocolate"
                                                Select element

To this:

Dim LinqQuery As IEnumerable(Of XElement) = From element In Doc.Root.Descendants
                                                Where element.Parent.@name = "Chocolate"
                                                Select element