Deserialize Trivial XML

Question

Hi, Everybody!...

All I need to do is to deserialize the following, seemingly trivial XML...

<ExtendedProperties> <ExtendedProperty> <Property>Some Property</Property> <Value>Some Value</Value> </ExtendedProperty> <ExtendedProperty> <Property>Some Other Property</Property> <Value>Some Other Value</Value> </ExtendedProperty> </ExtendedProperties>

I wrote the following code...

private ExtendedProperties XmlStringToObject(string xmlString)
{
	using (var memoryStream = new MemoryStream(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(xmlString)))
	{
		var xmlSerializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ExtendedProperties));

		return (ExtendedProperties)xmlSerializer.Deserialize(memoryStream);
	}
}

• Where ExtendedProperties is simply a List of ExtendedProperty and ExtendedProperty is simply a Property/Value pair.

public class ExtendedProperties : List<ExtendedProperty>
{
	***<SNIP />***
}

public class ExtendedProperty
{
	public string Property { get; set; }
	public string Value { get; set; }

	***<SNIP />***
}

I am getting the following error...

System.InvalidOperationException: <ExtendedProperties xmlns=''> was not expected.

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You just need to decorate your root type to tell the serialiser what the root node is in your XML:

[XmlRoot("ExtendedProperties")]
public class ExtendedProperties : List<ExtendedProperty> {
}