How to get parent element name using XmlReader in C#

Question

I'm writing a program that reads an XML (Element only) and stores the value into database.

But there are such no methods in XmlReader Class to get the name/value of Parent Node of a child node. Is there any workaround or should i use any other parser.

Answer 1

As XmlReader provides forward-only access, it is not possible at least without reading the document more than once. Why not to use Linq to XML?

var xml = XElement.Load(xmlReader);
var element = xml.Descendants("someElement").First();
var parent = element.Parent;

Answer 2

As MSDN says about XmlReader:

Represents a reader that provides fast, noncached, forward-only access to XML data

Сonsidering that, XMLReader is better for processing large XML. If that is your case, you need to store info about parent node before you move to process nested nodes. But if you work with small XML, tha better choise to process nodes is LINQ to XML (as @Juriewicz Bartek has advised to you), that make related navigation easier.

Answer 3

Maybe check the XmlReader.ReadSubtree method. It creates a NEW XmlReader so that you can derive the children nodes' information from it without moving the original XmlReader to a much to deep level ...

Answer 4

If you are on the .Net Framework and you're not bothered to be future-proof and so stay on .NET 4.8, you could use reflection:

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var xml = @"<document><node1>my text</node1>/document>";
        var reader = XmlReader.Create(new StringReader(xml));
        var nodesInfo = reader.GetType().GetField("nodes", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance| BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy);
        dynamic nodes = nodesInfo.GetValue(reader);
        while (reader.Read())
        {
            switch (reader.NodeType)
            {
                case XmlNodeType.Element:
                    {
                        switch (reader.Depth)
                        {
                            case 1:
                                var node = nodes[reader.Depth - 1];
                                var localNameInfo = node.GetType().GetField("localName", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.FlattenHierarchy);
                                var localName = (string) localNameInfo.GetValue(node);
                                Console.WriteLine("Parent node = " + localName);
                                return;
                        }
                    }
                    break;
            }
        }
    }