Deserializing XML with RestSharp - windows-phone-7

Question

I'm trying out RestSharp for a WP7 project. Having some trouble deserializing some XML with RestSharp. The object is null. Here's some of the relevant XML:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<api_response xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<response_data>
<employee_information>
<employee>
<employee_sf_name>David</employee_sf_name>
<employee_first_name>Dave</employee_first_name>
<employee_last_name>Jones</employee_last_name>
</employee>
</employee_information>
</response_data>
</api_response>
And here's my request:
public static void executeRequest(Action<string> callback, string method)
{
var client = new RestClient();
var request = new RestRequest(Method.POST);
client.BaseUrl = App.url + method;
request.AddParameter("secret_key", Application.secret_key);
request.AddParameter("email", Application.email);
request.AddParameter("password", Application.password);
client.ExecuteAsync<Employee>(request, response =>
{
callback(response.Content); //prints the response as output
Debug.WriteLine("firstname " + response.Data.employee_first_name);
});
}
And here's the Employee object:
public class Employee
{
public Employee() { }
public int employee_id { get; set; }
public String employee_first_name { get; set; }
public String employee_last_name { get; set; }
}
Since the response comes back fine I tried deserializing it in a separate function, but without success:
public static void parse(string data)
{
Debug.WriteLine(data);
XmlDeserializer xml = new XmlDeserializer();
Employee employee = new Employee();
employee = xml.Deserialize<Employee>(new RestResponse() { Content = data });
Debug.WriteLine("last name " + employee.employee_last_name);
Debug.WriteLine("firstname " + employee.employee_first_name);
}
Thanks in advance if anyone can shed some light on the issue.

Answer 1

First off, the closing tag needs to be a closing tag. After I fixed that, I set up an enclosing class:
public class employee_information
{
public Employee employee { get; set; }
}
Then kept your original Employee class:
public class Employee
{
public Employee() { }
public int employee_id { get; set; }
public String employee_first_name { get; set; }
public String employee_last_name { get; set; }
}
Then, to deserialize it:
var empInfo = xml.Deserialize<employee_information>((new RestResponse() {Content = data}));

Answer 2

Adding request.RootElement = "employee"; should work with your existing code. If you don't want to start that far down the tree, you need to create classes that match the entire hierarchy.