Daniel's Blog

C# Convert XML to an object or list of an object

Instead of doing my normal “write up an object and then parse the xml into it’s properties”, I decided to have a look at the XML deserialiser (well, deserializer in C# itself) – which has worked, and has saved me a lot of time.

Obviously you will need to create your object first, so here’s a person one:

[XmlRoot(ElementName = "person")] 
public class Person 
{
    public string FirstName { get; set; } 
    public string LastName { get; set; } 
}

Note the XmlRoot attribute – you will need to set this to the XML node that contains your properties.

Next you will need an XML document, here’s my sample one:

	<people>
		<person>
			<FirstName>Daniel</FirstName>
			<LastName>Wylie</LastName>
		</person>
		<person>
			<FirstName>Jhon</FirstName>
			<LastName>Smith</LastName>
		</person>
			<person>
			<FirstName>Sam</FirstName>
			<LastName>Brown</LastName>
		</person>
	</people>

And of course, the XML Deserialiser class

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;

namespace SampleApplication.Common 
{ 
    public class Convertors 
    { 
        /// <summary> 
        /// Converts a single XML tree to the type of T 
        /// </summary> 
        /// <typeparam name="T">Type to return</typeparam> 
        /// <param name="xml">XML string to convert</param> 
        /// <returns></returns> 
        public static T XmlToObject<T>(string xml) 
        { 
            using (var xmlStream = new StringReader(xml)) 
            { 
                var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(T));
                return (T)serializer.Deserialize(XmlReader.Create(xmlStream)); 
            } 
        }

       /// <summary> 
       /// Converts the XML to a list of T
       /// </summary> 
       /// <typeparam name="T">Type to return</typeparam> 
       /// <param name="xml">XML string to convert</param> 
       /// <param name="nodePath">XML Node path to select <example>//People/Person</example></param> 
        /// <returns></returns> 
        public static List<T> XmlToObjectList<T>(string xml, string nodePath) 
        { 
            var xmlDocument = new XmlDocument(); 
            xmlDocument.LoadXml(xml);

            var returnItemsList = new List<T>();

            foreach (XmlNode xmlNode in xmlDocument.SelectNodes(nodePath)) 
            { 
                returnItemsList.Add(XmlToObject<T>(xmlNode.OuterXml)); 
            }

            return returnItemsList; 
        } 
    } 
}

Usage:

var List<Person> = Convertors.XmlToObjectList<Person>(PeopleXML (Load how you wish), "//People/Person");