How to Convert XML to a dynamic object in C#

First of all how to parse a predefined XML structure to a class object in C#

Sample XML:

<User>
      <Name>Joseph Lawrence</Name>
      <Class>Second</Class>
      <Section>B</Section>
      <Roll_number>2735</Roll_number>
      <Joining_Dt>20160323</Joining_Dt>
</User>

Above sample can be parsed by creating a class and setting each variable to it’s respective XML attribute. See below:

 [XmlRoot(ElementName = "User")]
	public class User
	{
    	[XmlElement(ElementName = "Name")]
    		public string Name { get; set; }
    	[XmlElement(ElementName = "Class")]
    		public string Class { get; set; }
    	[XmlElement(ElementName = "Section")]
    		public string Section { get; set; }
    	[XmlElement(ElementName = "Roll_number")]
    		public string Roll_number { get; set; }
    	[XmlElement(ElementName = "Joining_Dt")]
    		public string Joining_Dt { get; set; }
	}

Code to convert XML to object of User class:

string contents = File.ReadAllText(xmlstring);
    XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(User));
    StringReader rdr = new StringReader(contents);
    User resultingMessage = (User)serializer.Deserialize(rdr);

But sometimes fields vary from XML to XML or when some of these fields are changed in the xml, classes will need to be modified again. So a better approach is to create dynamic object using C# inbuilt class “ExpandObject” that will parse a dictionary to dynamic object. This can be used for further processing.

Convert XML to key-value pair dictionary and pass to below method:

var dynamicObject = new ExpandoObject() as IDictionary<string, Object>;
foreach (var property in properties)
{
dynamicObject.Add(property.Key, property.Value);
}

Get field values back from the dynamic object: Since dynamic object created above is of Dictionary<string, Object> type, it can be accessed by iterating as below:

foreach (KeyValuePair<string, object> kvp in dynamicObject) {
// iterating over it gives the Properties and Values as a KeyValuePair
System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine("{0} = {1}", kvp.Key, kvp.Value);
}