How do I specify XML serialization attributes to support namespace prefixes during deserialization in .NET?

Question

I have a following XML:

<person xmlns:a="http://example.com" xmlns:b="http://sample.net">
    <a:fName>John</a:fName>
    <a:lName>Wayne</a:lName>
    <b:age>37</b:age>
</person>

How do I define XML serialization attributes on a class to support described scenario?

Solution

You'll need to indicate which namespaces each field requires by using Namespace of XmlElement attribute. This will allow you to associate a field with a particular namespace, but you'll also need to expose a property on your class that returns type XmlNamespaceDeclarations in order to get the prefix association.

See documentation and sample below:

[XmlRoot(ElementName = "person")]
public class Person
{
    [XmlElement(Namespace = "http://example.com")]
    public string fname;

    [XmlElement(Namespace = "http://sample.com")]
    public string lname;

    [XmlNamespaceDeclarations]
    public XmlSerializerNamespaces xmlns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();

    public Person()
    {
        xmlns.Add("a", "http://example.com");
        xmlns.Add("b", "http://sample.com");
    }
}