Get Xml content into a string from a subchild using c#

Question

It is my first time posting, and I am very new to C#, so I appreciate the help. I have so many variations of this code that are close to what I need, but I can't get on my own.

I am trying to get the contents of a sub-child in an XML sting using c#. This is the sting I receive:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<activation>
    <activationOutput>
        <AID>7706a84f-5sef5-4b49-891c-98414ebb61d5</AID>
        <protectionKeyId>18305465463798407</protectionKeyId>
        <activationString>encoded xml string</activationString>// What I need
    </activationOutput>
    <activationInput>
        <activationAttribute>
              <attributeName></attributeName>
              <attributeValue></attributeValue>
              <isvPermission></isvPermission>
              <endUserPermission></endUserPermission>
        </activationAttribute>
        <activationAttribute>
           <attributeName></attributeName>
                <attributeValue></attributeValue>
        </activationAttribute>
        <comments></comments>
    </activationInput>
</activation>

I need to get the activationString value out into a string. Having the other elements would be nice, but I only care about getting into a string v2c called. The information in between the tags is another encoded XML string.

I first bring the sting into an XML element using:

XElement rootActivation = XElement.Parse(encodedActivationResponse, LoadOptions.SetLineInfo);

What has got me stumped is how to get the sub child out as a string. Using XElement element gets me the values for all of the children under ActivationOutput, but I only need the last one.

string activationOutput = rootActivation.Element("activationOutput").Value;

It sends me a long unusable string

7706a84f-5sef5-4b49-891c-98414ebb61d518305465463798407encodedxmlstring

I've also tried:

IEnumerable<XElement> activationString = rootActivation.Elements("activationString");

It looked promising, but I don't know how to get the value out as a string. It shows as

{System.Xml.Linq.Extenstions.GetDescendantsXElement>}

I was hoping that I could take the variable and push it into a string using:

string v2c = activationString.ToString;

But that does not work either

Answer 1

Your attempt

string activationOutput = rootActivation.Element("activationOutput").Value;

does give you a concatenation of all the text() nodes that are children of <activationOutput>. Obviously, that's not what you want.

To solely get the <activationString>'s text() node use

string activation = 
  (string)rootActivation.Element("activationOutput").Element("activationString").Value;

One restriction of this approach is: it only gets the first of each elements.