Is it possible to create multiple objects from an XML file?

Question

public class xmlvalues
{
    public int    id { get; set; }
    public string a { get; set; }
    public string b { get; set; }
    public string c { get; set; }
}

-- XML Example
<instance>
  <id>>1</id>
  <a>value 1A</a>
  <b>value 1B</b>
  <c>value 1C</c>
</instance>


<instance>
  <id>>2</id>
  <a>value 2A</a>
  <b>value 2B</b>
  <c>value 2C</c>
</instance>

Using the above example is possible to create an object for each "instance" node in the XML file? In this example there would be 2 instances of the object "xmlvalues" but in theory there could be many more. Is there an easy way to do this?

Answer 1

using list

using System.Xml.Linq;

XDocument xdoc = XDocument.Load(@"...\path\document.xml");

List<xmlvalues> lists = (from lv1 in xdoc.Descendants("instance")
                       select new xmlvalues
                       {
                           id = lv1.Element("id"),
                           a= lv1.Element("a"),
                           b= lv1.Element("b"),
                           c= lv1.Element("c")
                       }).ToList();

Answer 2

One way to do it, you would have to adapt your xpath:

using System.Xml.XPath;
using System.Xml.Linq;

foreach  (XElement el  in xdoc.Root.XPathSelectElements ( "instance" ) ) { 
     //do something with el
}

This is faster than .Descendants() because it doesn't have to check all the nodes, just the ones found at the x-path ("instance" in the above case)