Best way to read through xml

Chinjoo picture Chinjoo · Mar 4, 2011 · Viewed 32k times · Source

HI I have a xml document like this:

<Students>
<student name="A" class="1"/>
<student name="B"class="2"/>
<student name="c" class="3"/>
</Students>

I want to use XmlReader to read through this xml and return a list of students as List<student>. I know this can be achieved as follows:

 List<Student> students = new List<Student>();
    XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create("AppManifest.xml");
    while (reader.Read())
    {
       if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && reader.Name == "student")
       {
            students.Add(new Student()
            {
                 Name = reader.GetAttribute("name"),
                 Class = reader.GetAttribute("Class")
             });
        }
     }

I just want to know if there is any better solution for this?

I am using silverlight 4. The xml structure is static, ie. it will have only one Students node and all the student node with above said attributes will only be there.

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Mar 4, 2011

Absolutely - use LINQ to XML. It's so much simpler:

XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("AppManifest.xml");
var students = doc.Root
                  .Elements("student")
                  .Select(x => new Student {
                              Name = (string) x.Attribute("name"),
                              Class = (string) x.Attribute("class")
                          })
                  .ToList();

XmlReader is a relatively low-level type - I would avoid it unless you really can't afford to slurp the whole of the XML into memory at a time. Even then there are ways of using LINQ to XML in conjunction with XmlReader if you just want subtrees of the document.