How to get xpath from an XmlNode instance

Question

Could someone supply some code that would get the xpath of a System.Xml.XmlNode instance?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I found that none of the above worked with XDocument, so I wrote my own code to support XDocument and used recursion. I think this code handles multiple identical nodes better than some of the other code here because it first tries to go as deep in to the XML path as it can and then backs up to build only what is needed. So if you have /home/white/bob and /home/white/mike and you want to create /home/white/bob/garage the code will know how to create that. However, I didn't want to mess with predicates or wildcards, so I explicitly disallowed those; but it would be easy to add support for them.

Private Sub NodeItterate(XDoc As XElement, XPath As String)
    'get the deepest path
    Dim nodes As IEnumerable(Of XElement)

    nodes = XDoc.XPathSelectElements(XPath)

    'if it doesn't exist, try the next shallow path
    If nodes.Count = 0 Then
        NodeItterate(XDoc, XPath.Substring(0, XPath.LastIndexOf("/")))
        'by this time all the required parent elements will have been constructed
        Dim ParentPath As String = XPath.Substring(0, XPath.LastIndexOf("/"))
        Dim ParentNode As XElement = XDoc.XPathSelectElement(ParentPath)
        Dim NewElementName As String = XPath.Substring(XPath.LastIndexOf("/") + 1, XPath.Length - XPath.LastIndexOf("/") - 1)
        ParentNode.Add(New XElement(NewElementName))
    End If

    'if we find there are more than 1 elements at the deepest path we have access to, we can't proceed
    If nodes.Count > 1 Then
        Throw New ArgumentOutOfRangeException("There are too many paths that match your expression.")
    End If

    'if there is just one element, we can proceed
    If nodes.Count = 1 Then
        'just proceed
    End If

End Sub

Public Sub CreateXPath(ByVal XDoc As XElement, ByVal XPath As String)

    If XPath.Contains("//") Or XPath.Contains("*") Or XPath.Contains(".") Then
        Throw New ArgumentException("Can't create a path based on searches, wildcards, or relative paths.")
    End If

    If Regex.IsMatch(XPath, "\[\]()@='<>\|") Then
        Throw New ArgumentException("Can't create a path based on predicates.")
    End If

    'we will process this recursively.
    NodeItterate(XDoc, XPath)

End Sub