How do you desearialize a bool from Xml with custom true and false values?

Question

I am trying to deserialize an Xml document to a C# class. The Xml looks something like this:

<response>
    <result>Success</result>
</response>

That result can be only "Success" or "Failed". When I deserialize it I want to put the value into a bool with "Success" = true and "Failed" = false. I can't quite figure out how to set the true and valse constants though? The code I have at the moment looks like this.

[XmlRoot(ElementName="response")]
public class Response()
{
    [XmlElement(ElementName="result")]
    public bool Result { get; set; }
}

Answer 1

One solution is to have an enumeration defined as follows and add extension method:

enum SuccessBool
{
    False = -1,
    Failed = -2,
    Failure = -3,
    Unseccessful = -4,                      
    True = 1,
    Success = 2,
    Successful = 3
}

static class SuccessBoolExtenson
{
    public static bool ToBool(this SuccessBool success)
    {
        return (int)success > 0;
    }
}

This will help with defining multiple definitions of successful/unsuccessful and all is type safe.

Answer 2

Define another property that is hidden, which does the translation for you:

[XmlRoot(ElementName="response")]
public class Response()
{
  [XmlElement(ElementName="result")]
  private string ResultInternal { get; set; }

  [XmlIgnore()]
  public bool Result{
    get{
      return this.ResultInternal == "Success";
    }
    set{
      this.ResultInternal = value ? "Success" : "Failed";
    }
  }
}