What is a good way to find a specific value in an XML document using C#?

Question

I'm calling a WebService exposed by Oracle that accepts an input of an ItemID and returns to me the corresponding Item Number. I want to grab the Item Number that has been returned out of the XML contained in the response.

The XML looks like this:

<env:Envelope
  xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
  xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:ns0="http://dev1/MyWebService1.wsdl">
 <env:Header>
  <wsse:Security
    xmlns:wsse="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"
    xmlns="http://docs.oasis-open.org/wss/2004/01/oasis-200401-wss-wssecurity-secext-1.0.xsd"
    xmlns:env="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
    env:mustUnderstand="1"/>
 </env:Header>
 <env:Body>
  <ns0:getItemNbrByItemIdResponseElement>
   <ns0:result>1010603</ns0:result>
  </ns0:getItemNbrByItemIdResponseElement>
 </env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

I'm interested in grabbing only the <ns0:result>1010603</ns0:result> particularly only the 1010603.

I haven't done a lot of work parsing XML using C# and I'm playing around with a few different methods so far. What is the recommended way to do this?

I'm on VS2008 (so XPath is available etc.)

Answer 1

I'd personally use LINQ to XML, because I find that easier to deal with than XPath, particularly when namespaces are involved. You'd do something like:

XNamespace ns0 = "http://dev1/MyWebService1.wsdl";

String result = doc.Descendants(ns0 + "result").First().Value;

Note that doc here is expected to be an XDocument, not an XmlDocument. (My guess is that this is why it wasn't showing up for you.)