linq to xml - get rid of blank xmlns

Question

I\'m trying to get rid of empty namespace tags in my xml file. All of the solutions i\'ve seen are based creating the xml from scratch. I have various xelements constructed

Answer 1

I think the second answer down on this post:

XElement Add function adds xmlns="" to the XElement

was very useful. Basically if you just do

XNamespace rootNamespace = doc.Root.Name.NamespaceName;
XElement referenceElement = new XElement(rootNamespace + "Reference");

That should solve it. So I guess you have to tell it not to worry about a special namespace when you are creating the element. Odd.

Answer 2

Possibly it's this: Empty namespace using Linq Xml

This would indicate your document is in a different default namespace than the elements you add.

Answer 3

There's a post on MSDN blogs that shows how to get around this (reasonably) easily. Before outputing the XML, you'll want to execute this code:

foreach (XElement e in root.DescendantsAndSelf())
{
    if (e.Name.Namespace == string.Empty)
    {
        e.Name = ns + e.Name.LocalName;
    }
}

The alternative, as the poster mentions, is prefixing every element name with the namespace as you add it, but this seems like a nicer solution in that it's more automated and saves a bit of typing.