How to Disable Root Element Rendering in XML Serialization for Arrays?

XML Serialization: Disabling Rendering of Root Element in Arrays

Serialization is a crucial process in software development, enabling objects to be converted into a persistent format like XML. However, there are times when you might desire to modify the serialization behavior, such as disabling the rendering of the root element for collections.

Disabling Root Element Rendering

Consider a class representing a shop item with both a product name and a list of variants. By default, serialization using XML annotations like [XmlRoot] and [XmlArrayItem] produces the following XML:

<SHOPITEM>
  <PRODUCTNAME>test</PRODUCTNAME>
  <Variants>
    <VARIANT>
      <PRODUCTNAME>hi 1</PRODUCTNAME>
    </VARIANT>
    <VARIANT>
      <PRODUCTNAME>hi 2</PRODUCTNAME>
    </VARIANT>
  </Variants>
</SHOPITEM>

However, you may wish to eliminate the Variants element altogether. To achieve this, replace the [XmlArrayItem] attribute with [XmlElement] in your code. This instructs the serializer to render the variants as direct children of the SHOPITEM root element.

<SHOPITEM>
  <PRODUCTNAME>test</PRODUCTNAME>
  <VARIANT>
    <PRODUCTNAME>hi 1</PRODUCTNAME>
  </VARIANT>
  <VARIANT>
    <PRODUCTNAME>hi 2</PRODUCTNAME>
  </VARIANT>
</SHOPITEM>

Removing Namespaces

You may also notice the presence of xsi and xsd namespaces in the root element. If desired, you can remove these namespaces by creating an XmlSerializerNamespaces instance with an empty namespace and supplying it during serialization.

Example Code

The following example demonstrates the described modifications:

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

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

// ...

ShopItem item = new ShopItem()
{
    ProductName = "test",
    Variants    = new List<ShopItem>()
    {
        new ShopItem{ ProductName = "hi 1" },
        new ShopItem{ ProductName = "hi 2" }
    }
};

// This will remove the xsi/xsd namespaces from serialization
XmlSerializerNamespaces ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
ns.Add("", "");

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

Output

The resulting XML without the Variants element and namespaces:

<SHOPITEM>
  <PRODUCTNAME>test</PRODUCTNAME>
  <VARIANT>
    <PRODUCTNAME>hi 1</PRODUCTNAME>
  </VARIANT>
  <VARIANT>
    <PRODUCTNAME>hi 2</PRODUCTNAME>
  </VARIANT>
</SHOPITEM>

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