Read a XML tree structure recursively in a List with children lists

Question

I have an XML like this:

And I have a Member class with property Name.

How can I read every Unit and its children Units into multiple generic List

Answer 1

The challenge would be to write it as 1 LINQ query, but that's beyond me. LINQ isn't easy/suitable for recursion.

I'll sketch a solution, I'm not going to write it out :

• read the Xml into an XDocument (or XmlDocument)
• define a class Unit { ... ; ... List Children; }
• define Units and Root classes if desired. I'll flatten that part here
• get a flat list of all Unit tags, var units = doc.Descendants("Unit");
• Iterate over those elements, I assume that a parent node will always come before a nested Unit
• look up the Parent of each node in a var Lookup = new Dictionary ();
• if a Parent is found, add the current node (new Unit) to its Children
• else add it to a topList
• add the new Unit and the XElement to the dictionary.
• the lookup dictionary is only needed while creating the lists.