Transform XML to Objects by Grouping its Data

In this blog, I will try to explain how to transform a XML file to a custom Type by grouping the main XML file.

In my previous blog, I have explained how to group data present in a XML file and transform the output into a new XML file. In this blog I will transform the data into a custom Object. I will be using the same XML file Products that I used in my previous blog, here is the link for my previous blog: Grouping Data in XML File using LINQ-XML.

 

Now, I want to group the products data by category and store the results into following custom type:

public class Product
{
    public int ProductId { get; set; }
    public string ProductName { get; set; }
    public decimal Price { get; set; }
    public string Color { get; set; }
}

public class ProductsByCategoty
{
    public string Category { get; set; }
    public List<Product> ProductsUnderEachCategory { get; set; }
}

As you can see, the class design is straight forward, since we are grouping the products by category. In the ProductsByCategory class we have a property Category and since each category may have multiple products, we have a second property that will be a List of Product classes.

Here is the LINQ query to do that.

 

1. Method Syntax:

List<ProductsByCategoty> productsByCategotyMS = products.Root.Descendants("Product")
        .GroupBy(p => p.Element("Category").Value)
        .Select(p => new ProductsByCategoty
        {
            Category = p.Key,
            ProductsUnderEachCategory = (p.Select(x => new Product
            {
                ProductId = Convert.ToInt32(x.Element("ID").Value),
                ProductName = x.Element("Name").Value,
                Price = Convert.ToDecimal(x.Element("Price").Value),
                Color = x.Element("Color").Value
                })).ToList()
            }).ToList();

 2. Query Syntax:

List<ProductsByCategoty> productsByCategotyQS = (from p in products.Root.Descendants("Product")
          group p by p.Element("Category").Value into g
          select new ProductsByCategoty
          {
              Category = g.Key,
              ProductsUnderEachCategory = (from x in g
              select new Product
              {
                  ProductId = Convert.ToInt32(x.Element("ID").Value),
                  ProductName = x.Element("Name").Value,
                  Price = Convert.ToDecimal(x.Element("Price").Value),
                  Color = x.Element("Color").Value
              }).ToList()
              }).ToList();

Now, we can simply fetch the output using a nested foreach loop:

foreach (var item in productsByCategotyQS)
{
    Console.WriteLine("Category: {0}", item.Category);
    foreach (var pro in item.ProductsUnderEachCategory)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("ProductId: {0}, Name: {1}, Price: {2}, Color: {3}",
        pro.ProductId, pro.ProductName, pro.Price, pro.Color);
    }
    Console.WriteLine("-------------------------------------------------------");
 }

Please let me know in case of any issues. Happy Coding :)