Remove xml namespaces from WCF restful response

Question

I am using WCF to return a plain old XML (POX) document to the caller. I am using the XML Serializer formatter to turn the objects into XML.

In the returned docum

Answer 1

Just to give the other perspective, if the namespace is unique to your project, e.g:

http://mycompany.com/myapi/

then it should be retained.

Such namespaces are best practice, they'll add less than 1 line of boilerplate to any XPath calls (which you can turn into a helper method) and require about 15 lines of helper code to generate a prefix/URI map, but that is the ONLY downside and you won't always encounter it.

In exchange you get unambiguous names for every element and that means you can compose third party namespaces with impunity e.g. in theory you could return XHTML directly without application level encoding.

Other namespaces turning up is unlikely to be an issue, as they are unlikely to be used on any of the tags that you defined in your project. In fact, if they are, then there is a bug somewhere. The likely explanaintion for there existence is that the framework added them just in case it needed to add an element somewhere below the spot where they are declared, which may not be a location you have to care about.

Another answer mentioned http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance which is a bit special, perhaps you could say what namespaces were added.