Consider the xml message below

<document xmlns="http://www.valid.nl/2015/test">
  <meta>
    <documentid>1234</documentid>
    <documentlocation>c:\temp\data.xml</documentlocation>
  </meta>
  <pages>
    <page id="1">
      <text bold="true">This is my text</text>
    </page>
    <page id="2">
      <text>Hello world</text>
    </page>
    <page id="3">
      <text bold="true">Next information</text>
    </page>
  </pages>
</document>

Mapping this to a class would make it tightly coupled. Any change to the message would mean an update to the class. We expect some minor changes to the XSD / XML message but only want to recompile on “real” impact like extra (needed) information. Changing the naming of the root node or grouping nodes should not result in a new deployment.

We plan to do this by querying the message with XPath. That searches for the information in the xml and does not need a complete mapping of the message to a class. Code says more than a thousand words.

var doc = new XmlDocument();
using(var reader = new XmlTextReader(path)) {
    // needed to ignore the namespace
    reader.Namespaces = false;
    doc.Load(reader);
}
var docid = doc.SelectSingleNode("//documentid");
var doclocation = doc.SelectSingleNode("//documentlocation");
var boldTexts = doc.SelectNodes("//text[@bold='true']");

Console.WriteLine("DocumentId: {0}", docid.InnerText);
Console.WriteLine("DocumentLocation: {0}", doclocation.InnerText);
foreach(XmlNode boldText in boldTexts) {
    Console.WriteLine("Found bold text: {0} on Page: {1}",
        boldText.InnerText,
        boldText.ParentNode.Attributes["id"].Value);
}

Changing the tags <document>, <meta>, <pages>, <page> or adding things like <headings> has no impact and the code would output the same.

What do you think?

References

W3Schools XPath Tutorial
Ignore namespace answer on stackoverflow