C# Load XML using XLINQ (LINQ to XML)

Today I'll show how to load an XML file into objects using XLINQ (Language Integrated Query for XML).

Imaging that you have an XML file which contains an Employee list with corresponding information about each employee. Now you want to load this list into memory and work with that data. For these purposes we have XLINQ technology which allows you to load the data from XML directly into business objects. 

Let's see how to use XLINQ in C#. First, we need to create our business objects:

public class Employee
{
    public int EmployeeID { get; set; }
    public string EmployeeName { get; set; }
    public string EmployeePosition { get; set; }
    public string EmployeeCountry { get; set; }
    public Project[] Projects { get; set; }
}

public class Project
{        
    public string ProjectCode { get; set; }
    public int ProjectBudget { get; set; }
}

So, each employee has an ID, Name, Position he holds, Country he lives. Each employee can participate several projects. The Project object contains a project Code and project Budget. Ok, here how employee object looks like in XML:

<employee>
    <id>1001</id>
    <name>John</name>
    <position>Developer</position>
    <country>USA</country>
    <projects>
        <project>
            <code>Orlando</code>
            <budget>1000</budget>
        </project>
        <project>
            <code>Rocket</code>
            <budget>7000</budget>
        </project>
    </projects>
</employee>

And finally this is how we loading the XML into our objects:

List<Employee> employeeList =
                (
                    from e in XDocument.Load(@"..\..\Employees.xml").Root.Elements("employee")
                    select new Employee
                    {
                        EmployeeID = (int)e.Element("id"),
                        EmployeeName = (string)e.Element("name"),
                        EmployeePosition = (string)e.Element("position"),
                        EmployeeCountry = (string)e.Element("country"),
                        Projects =
                        (
                            from p in e.Elements("projects").Elements("project")
                            select new Project
                            {
                                ProjectCode = (string)p.Element("code"),
                                ProjectBudget = (int)p.Element("budget")
                            }).ToArray()
                    }).ToList();

Download the code for this example (Visual Studio 2010).