xml serialization - remove namespace

Pankaj picture Pankaj · Nov 9, 2011 · Viewed 40.9k times · Source

I am serializing an object using c#. I am getting result in this format given bellow

  <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <Users xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
      <Users>
        <User Id="11005477969327" CreateDate="06/03/2011" LastSendDate="1/1/0001" />
        <User Id="11034688201594" CreateDate="04/22/2012" LastSendDate="1/1/0001" />
       <Users 
    </User>

But I want result in this format.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<Users>
  <User Id="11005477969327" SendDate="1/1/0001" NextSendDate="2/7/2012 11:13:30 AM" />
  <User Id="11034688201594" SendDate="1/1/0001" NextSendDate="2/7/2012 11:13:30 AM" />

</Users>

here my code

public class Users
    {
        [XmlArray("Users")]
        public List<User> ListData { get; set; }

        public string GetXML()
        {
            System.IO.MemoryStream ms = new System.IO.MemoryStream();

            XmlSerializer sr = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Users));
            sr.Serialize(ms, this);

            ms.Position = 0;
            return System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetString(ms.ToArray());
        }
    }

    public class User
    {
        [XmlAttribute("Id")]
        public Int64 UserId { get; set; }

        [XmlAttribute("CreateDate")]
        public string CreateDate { get; set; }

        [XmlAttribute("LastSendDate")]
        public string LastSendDate { get; set; }


    }

Answer

Vladimir Perevalov picture Vladimir Perevalov · Nov 9, 2011

You should simply replace [XmlArray("Users")] with [XmlElement("User")]

This attribute tell serializer, that you want to store all those User items under particular node "Users", if you replace it with XmlElement, serialzer will store all those users inline (right under first Users tag) just as you like it.

As for xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" namespaces. They are added automatically, but they are harmless, since all your elements are in the default namespace. You may add following code to your XmlSerializer call in order to remove those:

var xns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
var serializer = new XmlSerializer(users.GetType());
xns.Add(string.Empty, string.Empty);
//...
serializer.Serialize(stream, users, xns);