Best way to query XDocument with LINQ?

Question

I have an XML document that contains a series of item nodes that look like this:

    
        XYZ
                


        

Answer 1

use XPATH - it is very fast ( except xmlreader - but a lot of if's)

   using (var stream = new StringReader(xml))
   {
    XDocument xmlFile = XDocument.Load(stream);

    var query = (IEnumerable)xmlFile.XPathEvaluate("/data/item/parameter[@type='id']");

     foreach (var x in query.Cast<XElement>())
     {
         Console.WriteLine(  x.Value );
     }

    }

Answer 2

I would use the built-in query methods in LINQ to XML instead of XPath. Your query looks fine to me, except that:

• If there are multiple items, you'd need to find the descendants of that instead; or just use Element if you're looking for direct descendants of the item
• You may want to pull all the values at once and convert them into a dictionary
• If you're using different data types for the contents, you might want to cast the element instead of using .Value
• You may want to create a method to return the matching XElement for a given type, instead of having several queries.

Personally I don't think I'd even use a query expression for this. For example:

static XElement FindParameter(XElement element, string type)
{
    return element.Elements("parameter")
                  .SingleOrDefault(p => (string) p.Attribute("type") == type);
}

Then:

var mydata = from item in document.Root.Elements("item")
             select new {
                 Label = (string) item.Element("label"),
                 Description = (string) item.Element("description"),
                 Id = (int) FindParameter(item, "id"),
                 Name = (string) FindParameter(item, "name"),
                 Zip = (string) FindParameter(item, "zip")
             };

I suspect you'll find that's neater than any alternative using XPath, assuming I've understood what you're trying to do.