Represent XML without xsd

Question

Note: I cannot use XSD... not going to go into why.

I'm having a problem properly representing the following xml in a class that it should get deserialized into:

XML:

<product>
   <sku>oursku</sku>
   <attribute name="attrib1">value1</attribute>
   <attribute name="attrib2">value2</attribute>
   <attribute name="attribx">valuex</attribute>
</product>

the problem is representing the attribute nodes

What I have so far is:

[XmlElement(ElementName = "Attribute")]
public Attribute[] productAttributes;

public class Attribute
{
    [XmlAttribute(AttributeName = "Name")]
    public string attributeName;

    public Attribute()
    {

    }
}

I know I'm missing something to store the value, and perhaps

Answer 1

The XML you're trying to produce doesn't look like the sort that XmlSerializer is capable of creating natively. I think you're going to have to implement IXmlSerializable and custom-write it.

Answer 2

I think you need to use the attribute [XmlText]:

public class Attribute
{
    [XmlAttribute(AttributeName = "Name")]
    public string attributeName;

    [XmlText]
    public string Value {get;set;}

    public Attribute()
    {

    }
}

Answer 3

Running xsd.exe twice on your XML to create an intermediary XSD and then a C# class from it yields this result:

[Serializable]
[XmlType(AnonymousType=true)]
[XmlRoot(Namespace="", IsNullable=false)]
public partial class product 
{
    private string skuField;
    private productAttribute[] attributeField;

    [XmlElement(Form=XmlSchemaForm.Unqualified)]
    public string sku {
        get {
            return this.skuField;
        }
        set {
            this.skuField = value;
        }
    }

    [XmlElement("attribute", Form=XmlSchemaForm.Unqualified, IsNullable=true)]
    public productAttribute[] attribute {
        get {
            return this.attributeField;
        }
        set {
            this.attributeField = value;
        }
    }
}

[Serializable]
[XmlType(AnonymousType=true)]
public partial class productAttribute {

    private string nameField;
    private string valueField;

    [XmlAttribute]
    public string name {
        get {
            return this.nameField;
        }
        set {
            this.nameField = value;
        }
    }

    [XmlText]
    public string Value {
        get {
            return this.valueField;
        }
        set {
            this.valueField = value;
        }
    }
}

Does that work for you??