Access XML data using ExpandoObject

I haven’t dabbled much with any of the dynamic features available in the .NET Framework, but I recently came across this very handy technique of using ExpandoObject to iterate, and access, XML data a lot cleaner. Let’s use the following XML

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Employees>
  <Employee>
    <FirstName>Jason</FirstName>
  </Employee>
  <Employee>
    <FirstName>Mark</FirstName>
  </Employee>
</Employees>

Using an XDocument, we would need to write the following code to iterate through each employee

var doc = XDocument.Load("XmlFile1.xml");

foreach (var element in doc.Element("Employees").Elements("Employee"))
    Console.WriteLine(element.Element("FirstName").Value;

This is how I, and I assume many other devs, have gone about accessing XML data inside an XDocument. So here’s a neater way – an extension method that will do the hard work for us

public static class ExpandoXml
{
    public static dynamic AsExpando(this XDocument document)
    {
        return CreateExpando(document.Root);
    }

    private static dynamic CreateExpando(XElement element)
    {
        var result = new ExpandoObject() as IDictionary<string, object>;

        if (element.Elements().Any(e => e.HasElements))
        {
            var list = new List<ExpandoObject>();

            result.Add(element.Name.ToString(), list);

            foreach (var childElement in element.Elements())
                list.Add(CreateExpando(childElement));
        }
        else
        {
            foreach (var leafElement in element.Elements())
                result.Add(leafElement.Name.ToString(), leafElement.Value);
        }

        return result;
    }
}

Taking in an XDocument, the extension method will iterate through all the XElements, and each child element of those, building up a hierarchy of ExpandoObjects. This provides us the ability to access the XML like so

 var doc = XDocument.Load("XmlFile1.xml").AsExpando();

 foreach (var employee in doc.Employees)
     Console.WriteLine(employee.FirstName);

That looks much better.