How can I deserialize any xml element to a list via the XmlSerializer?

Question

I want to deserialize the following xml document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ExtensionFileTypes xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Group>
    <Item1>value 1</Item1>
    <Item2>value 2</Item2>
    <Item3>value 3</Item3>
    [ more items ... ]
  </Group>
</ExtensionFileTypes>

This document should be parsed to the following c# class:

public class ExtensionFileTypes
{
    [XmlArrayItem("Item*")]
    public List<string> Group = new List<string>();
}

The wildcard in the parameter of the class attribute [XmlArrayItem("Item*")] demonstrates what I want to archive: pass the xml elements <Item*> to my c# list.

I use the XmlSerializer to deserialize the xml-document:

public static void ReadXML(string pFilename)
{
    XmlSerializer lXmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ExtensionFileTypes));

    lXmlSerializer.UnknownElement += new XmlElementEventHandler(XmlSerializer_UnknownNode);

    FileStream lFileStream = new FileStream(pFilename, FileMode.Open);
    ExtensionFileTypes lExtensionFileTypes = (ExtensionFileTypes)lXmlSerializer.Deserialize(lFileStream);

    var lFoo = lExtensionFileTypes; // 0 Items in Group
}

Problem: lFoo contains 0 <Item*> elements:

How can I get these elements?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, the ElementName cannot contain a wildcard. If the number of Item elements is limited, for example, only Item1 , Item2 , Item3 , then you could apply the XmlArrayItem attribute multiple times. If the number of Item elements is large you could process a document in advance using Regex to change all Item* tags to Item :

string updatedXmlString = Regex.Replace(xmlString, "<(/?)Item[0-9]+>", "<$1Item>");

Now you can simply write:

public class ExtensionFileTypes
{
    [XmlArrayItem("Item")]
    public List<string> Group = new List<string>();
}

If you cannot apply preprocessing to the xml then you could always parse it manually or implement the IXmlSerializable interface.