Generate xml using LINQ to XML

Question

Suppose that I have a class that looks like below, how do I create xml like below using LINQ to XML?

public class Order
{
  public string OrderNo {get; set;}
  public string ItemId {get; set;}
  public string ItemDesc {get; set;}
  public int Qty {get; set;}
}

<orders>
  <orderid>
     <orderno>1</orderno>
     <itemid>W001</itemid>
     <itemdesc>C# T-Shirst</itemdesc>
     <quantity>2</quantity>
  </orderid> 
  <orderid>
     <orderno>2</orderno>
     <itemid>W002</itemid>
     <itemdesc>XML T-Shirt</itemdesc>
     <quantity>1</quantity>
  </orderid>
</orders>

Answer 1

While you can use XmlSerialization, there are quite a number of cases where using LINQ to XML is just as easy and doesn't lock your class implementation into a single serialization scheme. Here's a bit of code to handle your request.

var xOrders = new XElement("orders",
    from o in Orders
    select new XElement("orderid", 
        new XElement("orderno", order.OrderNo),
        new XElement("itemid", order.ItemId),
        new XElement("itemdesc", order.ItemDesc),
        new XElement("quantity", order.Qty)));

xOrders.Save(targetPath);