Best way to query XDocument with LINQ?

Question

I have an XML document that contains a series of item nodes that look like this:

<data>
    <item>
        <label>XYZ</label>
        <description>lorem ipsum</description>
        <parameter type="id">123</parameter>
        <parameter type="name">Adam Savage</parameter>
        <parameter type="zip">90210</parameter>
    </item> 
</data>

and I want to LINQ it into an anonymous type like this:

var mydata =
    (from root in document.Root.Elements("item")
    select new {
       label = (string)root.Element("label"),
       description = (string)root.Element("description"),
       id = ...,
       name = ...,
       zip = ...
     });

What's the best way to pull each parameter type according to the value of its 'type' attribute? Since there are many parameter elements you wind up with root.Elements("parameter") which is a collection. The best way I can think to do it is like this by method below but I feel like there must be a better way?

(from c in root.Descendants("parameter") where (string)c.Attribute("type") == "id"
select c.Value).SingleOrDefault()

Answer 1

I would use the built-in query methods in LINQ to XML instead of XPath. Your query looks fine to me, except that:

• If there are multiple items, you'd need to find the descendants of that instead; or just use Element if you're looking for direct descendants of the item
• You may want to pull all the values at once and convert them into a dictionary
• If you're using different data types for the contents, you might want to cast the element instead of using .Value
• You may want to create a method to return the matching XElement for a given type, instead of having several queries.

Personally I don't think I'd even use a query expression for this. For example:

static XElement FindParameter(XElement element, string type)
{
    return element.Elements("parameter")
                  .SingleOrDefault(p => (string) p.Attribute("type") == type);
}

Then:

var mydata = from item in document.Root.Elements("item")
             select new {
                 Label = (string) item.Element("label"),
                 Description = (string) item.Element("description"),
                 Id = (int) FindParameter(item, "id"),
                 Name = (string) FindParameter(item, "name"),
                 Zip = (string) FindParameter(item, "zip")
             };

I suspect you'll find that's neater than any alternative using XPath, assuming I've understood what you're trying to do.