How do I access innerText of a specific XMLnode

Question

Hi I have the following XML fragment:

  <Customer AccountNumber="4">
    <CustomerInfo>
      <firstName>Andrew</firstName>
      <lastName>Walker</lastName>
    </CustomerInfo>
    <Transactions>
      <AccountBalance>595848584.4</AccountBalance>
    </Transactions>
  </Customer>

from a bigger XML file. I want to access the <firsName> in C#. Currently I am doing the following:

    foreach (XmlNode customer in root)
    {
        i++;
        if(_AccNumber== Convert.ToInt32(customer.Attributes[0].Value))
        {
            searchNode = CustNodes[(i - 1)];
            string _firstName = searchNode.FirstChild.FirstChild.InnerText;

        }
    }

When I view searchNode in the debugger I can see in the results view element [0] which has a localName CustomerInfo as you expect. So in the debugger first name has the following path:

searchNode -> [0].[0].[0].value

if that makes sense?

Is there any better way of doing this? (without LINQ)? Apologies, if something isn't clear....its 2:30AM! Let me know and I'll explain myself better. Thanks!!

Answer 1

I think xpath is so much complex to understand , so better to use the GetElementsByTagName function

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        doc.Load(@"sample.xml");
        XmlNodeList firstNameNodes =  doc.GetElementsByTagName("firstName");
        foreach (XmlNode node in firstNameNodes)
        {
            string firstName =  node.InnerText;
        }

Answer 2

Try XPath.. something like this should work:

string firstName = String.Empty;

var xmlNode = doc.SelectSingleNode(String.Format("//Customer[@AccountNumber='{0}']/CustomerInfo/firstName", _AccNumber));
if (xmlNode != null)
    firstName = xmlNode.InnerText;