I have recently been writing an assembly which facilitates automatic deployment of K2.Net 2003 workflows. The assembly reads in a configuration file and deploys the workflows as specified in the configuration file. Also, rather than writing any custom code to validate the XML, I decided to use an XML Schema Definition, mainly because it saves me time and typing, but also because it’s good practice.
Anyhow, in order to use the XSD, I had to give my schema a namespace, and because I didn’t want to have to add a whole bunch of prefixes to my configuration file, I decided to use the default namespace:
<configuration xmlns="http://temuri.org/configuration.xsd"></configuration>
This broke all my xpath queries because the .NET XPath query code does not seem to handle the default namespace. What I ended up doing to fix it was using an XmlNamespaceManager to create a fake namespace with the same URI as the default namespace, and then change all of my XPath queries to use the prefix for that fake namespace. Something like:
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load("configuration.xml");
// To get the URI for the default namespace
string xmlns = doc.DocumentElement.GetAttribute("xmlns");
XmlNamespaceManager namespaceManager = new XmlNamespaceManager();
namespaceManager.AddNamespace( "a", xmlns );// Now query with XPath
XmlNodeList nodes = doc.SelectNodes("/a:configuration/a:solution");
With a configuration file which looks something like:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <configuration xmlns="http://temupri.org/configuration.xsd" ... > <solution path=""> <projects> <project name="Job Setup"> <references> <reference name="" gac="false" fullname="" /> </references> <processes> <process name="RequestLeave" /> <process name="RequestSomethingElse" /> </processes> </project> </projects> </solution> </configuration>
The way I see it, it involves less typing than actually using a prefix. That said, given that it feels like a lazy way out, it probably isn’t the best practice because there is now a difference between my queries and my xml.
guysherman.com 
You use hardcode XPath expression, but this is a bad way.
What would you suggest.