Populating ANY elements on a web service in C#

Question

Can someone point me to a C# example where they populate a request and receive the response for a web service where the schema is mostly implemented as ANY elements?

Answer 1

XmlNode is a type in the old XML Document Object Model that dates from c# 1.1. It has been superseded by the much easier to use LINQ to XML object model. What is not well known is that [XmlAnyElementAttribute] actually supports this API. Thus in your GenericRequestData_Type type you could manually change the Any property to be of type System.Xml.Linq.XElement[]:

public class GenericRequestData_Type
{
    private System.Xml.Linq.XElement[] anyField;

    [System.Xml.Serialization.XmlAnyElementAttribute()]
    public System.Xml.Linq.XElement[] Any
    {
        get
        {
            return this.anyField;
        }
        set
        {
            this.anyField = value;
        }
    }
}

Then you can initialize the array easily as follows, following the instructions in Creating XML Trees in C# (LINQ to XML):

// Taken from 
// https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt693096.aspx
var contacts =
    new XElement("Contacts",
        new XElement("Contact",
            new XElement("Name", "Patrick Hines"),
            new XElement("Phone", "206-555-0144"),
            new XElement("Address",
                new XElement("Street1", "123 Main St"),
                new XElement("City", "Mercer Island"),
                new XElement("State", "WA"),
                new XElement("Postal", "68042")
            )
        )
    );

var genericRequest = new GenericRequestData_Type();
genericRequest.Any = new[] { contacts };

Sample fiddle.