Is it possible to deserialize xml to List object using .net provided serialization attributes?

Question

I have xml input which looks like (simplified version used for example):

<Student>
<Subject> History </Subject>
<Subject> English </Subject>
</Student>

Is there a way to get the above xml deserialized to a object whose class looks like:

[Serializable]
[XmlRoot(ElementName = "Student", Namespace="")]
class Student
{
  public Student()
  {
    Subject = new List<string>();
  }

  public List<string> Subject {get;set;}

}

Note I am trying to figure out if this can be done without having to implement IXmlSerializable interface, and I want to use a list to store the Subject values (not a string [] which I know is possible is I use the XmlElement attribute).

Answer 1

Decorate the Subject property with the XmlArrayAttribute.

[XmlArray]
public List<string> Subject { get; set; }

---

If you need to omit the Subject element and have the Subject entries directly below Student, you can simply use the [XmlElement] attribute:

[XmlElement]
public List<string> Subject { get; set; }

Serializing this with the Student class produces output similar to this:

<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"utf-16\"?>
<Student xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\"
    xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\"&gt;
    <Subject>History</Subject>
    <Subject>English</Subject>
</Student>"