How can I extract a part of a xaml object graph via linq to xml?

Question

I have an object graph serialized to xaml. A rough sample of what it looks like is:

<MyObject xmlns.... >
    <MyObject.TheCollection>
        <PolymorphicObjectOne .../>
        <HiImPolymorphic ... />
    </MyObject.TheCollection>
</MyObject>

I want to use Linq to XML in order to extract the serialized objects within the TheCollection.

Note: MyObject may be named differently at runtime; I'm interested in any object that implements the same interface, which has a public collection called TheCollection that contains types of IPolymorphicLol.

The only things I know at runtime are the depth at which I will find the collection and that the collection element is named ``*.TheCollection`. Everything else will change.

The xml will be retrieved from a database using Linq; if I could combine both queries so instead of getting the entire serialized graph and then extracting the collection objects I would just get back the collection that would be sweet.

Answer 1

Will,

It is not possible to find out whether an object implements some interface by looking at XAML.
With constraints given you can find xml element that has a child named .

You can use following code: It will return all elements having child element which name ends with .TheCollection

    static IEnumerable<XElement> FindElement(XElement root)
    {
        foreach (var element in root.Elements())
        {
            if (element.Name.LocalName.EndsWith(".TheCollection"))
            {
                yield return element.Parent;
            }
            foreach (var subElement in FindElement(element))
            {
                yield return subElement;
            }
        }
    }

To make sure that object represented by this element implements some interface you need to read metadata from your assemblies. I would recommend you to use Mono.Cecil framework to analyze types in your assemblies without using reflection.