Question about XML deserialization in .net

Question

Hi, I'm trying to deserialize an XML that comes from a web service but I do not know how to tell the serializer how to handlke this piece of xml:

<Movimientos>
<Movimientos>
<NOM_ASOC>pI22E7P30KWB9KeUnI+JlMRBr7biS0JOJKo1JLJCy2ucI7n3MTFWkY5DhHyoPrWs</NOM_ASOC>
<FEC1>RZq60KwjWAYPG269X4r9lRZrjbQo8eRqIOmE8qa5p/0=</FEC1>
<IDENT_CLIE>IYbofEiD+wOCJ+ujYTUxgsWJTnGfVU+jcQyhzgQralM=</IDENT_CLIE>
</Movimientos>
<Movimientos>

As you can see, the child tag uses the same tag as its parent, I suppose this is wrong however the webservice is provided by an external company and that wont change it, is there any way or any library to tidy up XML or how can I use an attribute on my class so that the serializer gets it right? thanks for any help.

Answer 1

The serializer should be OK with it - the issue is probably just that a class can't have a property that's the same name as the class itself. So use XmlElementAttribute to match it up:

[XmlRoot("Movimientos")]
public class Movimientos
{
    [XmlElement("Movimientos")]
    public SomeOtherClass SomeOtherProperty { get; set; }
}

public class SomeOtherClass
{
    public string NOM_ASOC { get; set; }
    public string FEC1 { get; set; }
    public string IDENT_CLIE { get; set; }
}

FYI, the XML is actually not wrong; there's no rule in the spec saying that a child element can't have the same name as its parent element. It's unusual maybe, but still valid.

Answer 2

If this is not actually deserialized by the XML serializer of .Net, it's probably better to write your own class to parse it. You can use the System.Xml or System.Xml.Linq (easier) namespaces.