Read Node attributes from XML file

Question

I have the following XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Countries>
    <Country>
        <Id>101</Id>
        <City>Austin</City>
    </Country>
    <Country>
        <Id>102</Id>
        <City>Dallas</City>
    </Country>
    <Country>
        <Id>103</Id>
        <City>Chicago</City>
    </Country>
    <Country>
        <Id>104</Id>
        <City>Aman</City>
     </Country>
</Countries>

I am trying to read it from code behind. Here is the code

List<City> cityList = new List<City>();
string url = "/App_Data/Countries.xml";
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load(Server.MapPath(url));
XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.SelectNodes("Country");
foreach (XmlNode node in nodeList)
{
    if (node != null)
    {                        
        int id = int.Parse(node.Attributes["Country"].Value);
        string name = node.Attributes["City"].Value;
        City city = new City(id, name);
        cityList.Add(city);
    }
}

For some reason, the code below

XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.SelectNodes("Country");

returns no nodes at all.

Answer 1

According to https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hcebdtae(v=vs.110).aspx , here's what SelectNodes method does

Selects a list of nodes matching the XPath expression.

Since you do it like this

XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.SelectNodes("Country");

You're selecting all <Country> elements within the current context, which is the root, but the <Country> elements are actually inside <Countries> , so that's why you got no nodes at all. Change the syntax above to this

XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.SelectNodes("Countries/Country");

Here's more information about the XPath expression examples: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms256086%28v=vs.110%29.aspx

Answer 2

If you are targeting .NET 3.5 or upper, I would consider using XDocument API instead of XmlDocument API (see XDocument or XMLDocument ).

---

For your case, an implementation would look like this:

var cityList = new List<City>();            
XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Load(Server.MapPath("/App_Data/Countries.xml"));
foreach (XElement xCountry in xDoc.Root.Elements())
{
    int id = int.Parse(xCountry.Element("Id").Value);
    string name = xCountry.Element("City").Value;                
    cityList.Add(new City(id, name));
}

Answer 3

Thank you all. Figured it. Here is the updated code. But I think there must be a better way of populating objects than what I did.

  List<City> cityList = new List<City>();
            string url ="/App_Data/Countries.xml";
            XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
            doc.Load(Server.MapPath(url));
            XmlNodeList nodeList = doc.SelectNodes("//Country");
            foreach(XmlNode node in nodeList){
                if (node != null)
                {                        
                    int id = int.Parse(node.ChildNodes.Item(0).InnerText);
                    string name = node.ChildNodes.Item(1).InnerText;
                    City city = new City(id,name);
                    cityList.Add(city);
                }
            }