Consider this simple XML document. The serialized XML shown here is the result of an XmlSerializer from a complex POCO object whose schema I have no control over.
<My_RootNode xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="">
<id root="2.16.840.1.113883.3.51.1.1.1" extension="someIdentifier" xmlns="urn:hl7-org:v3" />
<creationTime xsi:nil="true" xmlns="urn:hl7-org:v3" />
</My_RootNode>
The goal is to extract the value of the extension attribute on the id node. In this case, we are using the SelectSingleNode method, and given an XPath expression as such:
XmlNode idNode = myXmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("/My_RootNode/id");
//idNode is evaluated to null at this point in the debugger!
string msgID = idNode.Attributes.GetNamedItem("extension").Value;
The problem is that the SelectSingleNode method returns null for the given XPath expression.
Question: any ideas on this XPath query's correctness, or why this method call + XPath expression would return a null value? Perhaps the namespaces are part of the problem?
I strongly suspect the problem is to do with namespaces. Try getting rid of the namespace and you'll be fine - but obviously that won't help in your real case, where I'd assume the document is fixed.
I can't remember offhand how to specify a namespace in an XPath expression, but I'm sure that's the problem.
EDIT: Okay, I've remembered how to do it now. It's not terribly pleasant though - you need to create an XmlNamespaceManager for it. Here's some sample code that works with your sample document:
using System;
using System.Xml;
public class Test
{
static void Main()
{
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
XmlNamespaceManager namespaces = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable);
namespaces.AddNamespace("ns", "urn:hl7-org:v3");
doc.Load("test.xml");
XmlNode idNode = doc.SelectSingleNode("/My_RootNode/ns:id", namespaces);
string msgID = idNode.Attributes["extension"].Value;
Console.WriteLine(msgID);
}
}
Well... I had the same issue and it was a headache. Since I didn't care much about the namespace or the xml schema, I just deleted this data from my xml and it solved all my issues. May not be the best answer? Probably, but if you don't want to deal with all of this and you ONLY care about the data (and won't be using the xml for some other task) deleting the namespace may solve your problems.
XmlDocument vinDoc = new XmlDocument();
string vinInfo = "your xml string";
vinDoc.LoadXml(vinInfo);
vinDoc.InnerXml = vinDoc.InnerXml.Replace("xmlns=\"http://tempuri.org\/\", "");
The rule to keep in mind is: if your document specifies a namespace, you MUST use an XmlNamespaceManager in your call to SelectNodes() or SelectSingleNode(). That's a good thing.
See the article Advantages of namespaces . Jon Skeet does a great job in his answer showing how to use XmlNamespaceManager. (This answer should really just be a comment on that answer, but I don't quite have enough Rep Points to comment.)
Sorry, you forgot the namespace. You need:
XmlNamespaceManager ns = new XmlNamespaceManager(myXmlDoc.NameTable);
ns.AddNamespace("hl7","urn:hl7-org:v3");
XmlNode idNode = myXmlDoc.SelectSingleNode("/My_RootNode/hl7:id", ns);
In fact, whether here or in web services, getting null back from an XPath operation or anything that depends on XPath usually indicates a problem with XML namespaces.
Just to build upon solving the namespace issues, in my case I've been running into documents with multiple namespaces and needed to handle namespaces properly. I wrote the function below to get a namespace manager to deal with any namespace in the document:
private XmlNamespaceManager GetNameSpaceManager(XmlDocument xDoc)
{
XmlNamespaceManager nsm = new XmlNamespaceManager(xDoc.NameTable);
XPathNavigator RootNode = xDoc.CreateNavigator();
RootNode.MoveToFollowing(XPathNodeType.Element);
IDictionary<string, string> NameSpaces = RootNode.GetNamespacesInScope(XmlNamespaceScope.All);
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, string> kvp in NameSpaces)
{
nsm.AddNamespace(kvp.Key, kvp.Value);
}
return nsm;
}
If you want to ignore namespaces completely, you can use this:
static void Main(string[] args)
{
string xml =
"<My_RootNode xmlns:xsi=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance\" xmlns:xsd=\"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema\" xmlns=\"\">\n" +
" <id root=\"2.16.840.1.113883.3.51.1.1.1\" extension=\"someIdentifier\" xmlns=\"urn:hl7-org:v3\" />\n" +
" <creationTime xsi:nil=\"true\" xmlns=\"urn:hl7-org:v3\" />\n" +
"</My_RootNode>";
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(xml);
XmlNode idNode = doc.SelectSingleNode("/*[local-name()='My_RootNode']/*[local-name()='id']");
}
This should work in your case without removing namespaces:
XmlNode idNode = myXmlDoc.GetElementsByTagName("id")[0];
Roisgoen's answer worked for me, but to make it more general, you can use a RegEx:
//Substitute "My_RootNode" for whatever your root node is
string strRegex = @"<My_RootNode(?<xmlns>\s+xmlns([\s]|[^>])*)>";
var myMatch = new Regex(strRegex, RegexOptions.None).Match(myXmlDoc.InnerXml);
if (myMatch.Success)
{
var grp = myMatch.Groups["xmlns"];
if (grp.Success)
{
myXmlDoc.InnerXml = myXmlDoc.InnerXml.Replace(grp.Value, "");
}
}
I fully admit that this is not a best-practice answer, but but it's an easy fix and sometimes that's all we need.
just use //id instead of /id. It works fine in my code
Source: Stackoverflow.com