Serialize a C# class to XML with attributes and a single value for the class

Question

I am using C# and XmlSerializer to serialize the following class:

public class Title {     [XmlAttribute("id")]     public int Id { get; set; }      public string Value { get; set; } } 

I would like this to serialize to the following XML format:

<Title id="123">Some Title Value</Title> 

In other words, I would like the Value property to be the value of the Title element in the XML file. I can't seem to find any way to do this without implementing my own XML serializer, which I would like to avoid. Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Try using [XmlText]:

public class Title {   [XmlAttribute("id")]   public int Id { get; set; }    [XmlText]   public string Value { get; set; } } 

Here's what I get (but I didn't spend a lot of time tweaking the XmlWriter, so you get a bunch of noise in the way of namespaces, etc.:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?> <Title xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"        xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"        id="123"        >Grand Poobah</Title>