Using Xpath With Default Namespace in C#

Question

I\'ve got an XML document with a default namespace. I\'m using a XPathNavigator to select a set of nodes using Xpath as follows:

XmlElement myXML = ...;           


        

Answer 1

My answer extends the previous answer by Brandon. I used his example to create an extension method as follows:

static public class XmlDocumentExt
{
    static public XmlNamespaceManager GetPopulatedNamespaceMgr(this System.Xml.XmlDocument xd)
    {
        XmlNamespaceManager nmsp = new XmlNamespaceManager(xd.NameTable);
        XPathNavigator nav = xd.DocumentElement.CreateNavigator();
        foreach (KeyValuePair kvp in nav.GetNamespacesInScope(XmlNamespaceScope.All))
        {
            string sKey = kvp.Key;
            if (sKey == "")
            {
                sKey = "default";
            }
            nmsp.AddNamespace(sKey, kvp.Value);
        }

        return nmsp;
    }
}

Then in my XML parsing code, I just add a single line:

XmlDocument xdCandidate = new XmlDocument();
xdCandidate.Load(sCandidateFile);
XmlNamespaceManager nmsp = xdCandidate.GetPopulatedNamespaceMgr();  // 1-line addition
XmlElement xeScoreData = (XmlElement)xdCandidate.SelectSingleNode("default:ScoreData", nmsp);

I really like this method because it is completely dynamic in terms of loading the namespaces from the source XML file, and it doesn't completely disregard the concept of XML namespaces so this can be used with XML that requires multiple namespaces for deconfliction.