Find or create an element by xpath using LINQ-to-XML

Question

Does anyone have a neat way of finding or creating an XObject using an xpath expression.

The problem I am having is that I need to set a value on an element (which I have the xpath for), which may or not be in existence. If it's not in existence I would like it to be created.

Any hints or links would be very much appreciated.

Thanks all.

Answer 1

You can use the System.Xml.XPath.Extensions class to evaluate XPath expressions on an XDocument.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xpath.extensions.aspx

For example:

using System.Xml.XPath;
...
XDocument doc = XDocument.Load("sample.xml");
var matching = doc.XPathEvaluate("//Book[@Title='Great Expectations']");  
// 'matching' could be an IEnumerable of XElements, depending on the query