creating DropdownList

Question

Consider the following XML file:

Answer 1

How about this?

        XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
        doc.Load(@"~/XML/XML.xml");
        var nodes = doc.SelectNodes("warehouse/cat[@id='computer']/item/SN");

        myDropDown.DataTextField = "InnerText";
        myDropDown.DataValueField = "InnerText";


        //now bind the dropdownlist to the dataview
        myDropDown.DataSource = nodes;
        myDropDown.DataBind();

Answer 2

Load the xml into an XElement:

        var xml = XElement.Load("test.xml");

Execute XPath to select the SN elements in the cats with id computer: (+ put them in a list)

        var snValues = xml.XPathSelectElements("//cat[@id='computer']/item/SN")
                        .Select(x => x.Value).ToList();

Required usings:

        using System.Linq;
        using System.Xml.Linq;
        using System.Xml.XPath;