XPath on an XML document with namespace

Question

I'm having this XML document with namespaces and I want to extract some nodes using XPath.

Here's the document:

<ArrayOfAnyType xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns="http://tempuri.org/">
  <anyType xsi:type="Document">
    <Id>5</Id>
    <Title>T1</Title>
  </anyType>

  <anyType xsi:type="Document">
    <Id>15</Id>
    <Title>T15</Title>
  </anyType>
</ArrayOfAnyType>

What's the XPath expression going to be if I want to extract all "anyType" elements with xsi:type="Document"?

I've tried this:

//anyType[@xsi:type="Document"]

and it doesn't work:

Solution

If you are using C# then you need to specify the namespace for the "anyType" element in your XPath:

var xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml( "your xml" );
var names = new XmlNamespaceManager( xml.NameTable );
names.AddNamespace( "xsi", "http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" );
names.AddNamespace( "a", "http://tempuri.org/" );
var nodes = xml.SelectNodes( "//a:anyType[@xsi:type='Document']", names );

Comments

[EnToutCas]

Thanks, I think what's wrong in my original expression is I need to prefix anyType with the namespace "xmlns".

[jcollum]

What is up with a:anyType? Is that some sort of magic value?

[Ashwani]

No, that's the name of the XML element being sought in the above question.

[jcollum]

ah, I see, didn't scroll over far enough