I have a xml document I need to serialize into a C# list.

<inventory>
<products>
    <product name="table" price="29.99" qty="4" />
    <product name="chair" price="9.99" qty="7" />
    <product name="couch" price="50" qty="2" />
    <product name="pillow" price="5" qty="1" />
    <product name="bed" price="225.00" qty="1" />
    <product name="bench" price="29.99" qty="3" />
    <product name="stool" price="19.99" qty="5" />
</products>

I've tried:

[XmlRoot("inventory")]
public class Inventory
{
    [XmlArray("products")]
    [XmlArrayItem("product")]
    public List<Product> Products { get; set; }
}

public class Product
{
    [XmlElement("name")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
    [XmlElement("price")]
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
    [XmlElement("qty")]
    public int Quantity { get; set; }
}

using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(path))
            {
                XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Product));
                products.Add((Product) serializer.Deserialize(reader));
            }

Which gives me an InvalidOperationException: was not expected.

Any help in this would be great.

CodePudding user response：

There two things wrong here:

• you are trying to deserialise a single Product, but your XML is an inventory containing multiple products. This is what is causing your exception. You want to deserialise Inventory
• name, price and qty are XML attributes, not elements

So amend your Product class:

public class Product
{
    [XmlAttribute("name")]
    public string Name { get; set; }
    [XmlAttribute("price")]
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
    [XmlAttribute("qty")]
    public int Quantity { get; set; }
}

And use the correct serialiser / cast:

var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Inventory));
var inventory = (Inventory)serializer.Deserialize(reader);

See this fiddle for a working demo.