How to Prevent XML Serialization of an Array's Root Element?

Disable Rendering of Array's Root Element in XML Serialization

In XML serialization, you may encounter a situation where you need to disable the rendering of the root element of an array. This question illustrates a scenario where a class with a collection of objects is serialized, resulting in an XML with an unwanted root element.

Resolution:

To disable the rendering of the root element, you can replace the [XmlArrayItem] attribute with [XmlElement] on the collection property. This instructs the serializer to directly serialize the collection elements instead of enclosing them within a root element.

Additionally, to remove the unnecessary xsi and xsd namespaces from the root element, you can create an instance of XmlSerializerNamespaces with an empty namespace. This namespace instance can be passed during serialization to prevent the inclusion of unwanted namespaces.

Example:

The following code snippet demonstrates the revised class definition and serialization process:

[XmlRoot("SHOPITEM")]
public class ShopItem
{
    [XmlElement("PRODUCTNAME")]
    public string ProductName { get; set; }

    [XmlElement("VARIANT")] // was [XmlArrayItem]
    public List<ShopItem> Variants { get; set; }
}

// ...

XmlSerializerNamespaces ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
ns.Add("", ""); // Empty namespace to remove xsi/xsd

XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ShopItem));
ser.Serialize(Console.Out, item, ns);

With these changes in place, the resulting XML will no longer contain the "Variants" root element and will lack the xsi/xsd namespaces. This effectively disables the rendering of the root element for the array.

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