populating object collection property with Linq

I have an XML structure that has many doc nodes, and each node may have zero or more extract paragraphs (paras).

<doc>   
    <docitem>3</docitem>
    <docid>129826</docid>
    <doctitle>sample title</doctitle>
    <docdatetime>2009-07-03T16:59:00</docdatetime>
    <collectdatetime>2009-07-03T16:59:23</collectdatetime>
    <summary>
        <summarytext>sample summary</summarytext>
    </summary>
    <paras>
        <paraitemcount>2</paraitemcount>
        <para>
            <paraitem>1</paraitem>
            <paratext>sample text 1</paratext>
        </para>
        <para>
            <paraitem>2</paraitem>
            <paratext>sample text 2</paratext>
        </para>
    <开发者_如何学编程;/paras>
</doc>
<doc>
...
</doc>

I also has some Linq code to populate some Document objects:

List<Document> documentsList = (from doc in xmlDocument.Descendants("doc")
                                select new Document
                                {
                                    DocId = doc.Element("docid").Value,
                                    DocTitle = doc.Element("doctitle").Value,
                                    DocDateTime = DateTime.Parse(doc.Element("docdate").Value),
                                    DocSummary = doc.Element("summary").Value,
                                    DocParas = "" ///missing code to populate List<string>                                  

                                    }
                                ).ToList<Document>();

Is it possible add all the paras nodes into the Document.DocParas List<string> using Linq and Xpath, or should I do this task in a different way?

Note: I'm using .NET C# 3.5

You could use smth like this:

DocParas = doc.XPathSelectElements("paras/para/paratext").Select(xElement => xElement.Value).ToList();

Not that XPathSelectElements is declared in System.Xml.XPath namespace.

I would use XML Serialization in this case. Since your parsing all your document (or at least a big part of it) to a model and your code begins to struggle with the levels in the XML, I think it's simpler to let the serialization framework do it's Job.

One way to get the para's :

XElement xElement2 = XElement.Parse(@"
            <doc>    
    <docitem>3</docitem> 
    <docid>129826</docid> 
    <doctitle>sample title</doctitle> 
    <docdatetime>2009-07-03T16:59:00</docdatetime> 
    <collectdatetime>2009-07-03T16:59:23</collectdatetime> 
    <summary> 
        <summarytext>sample summary</summarytext> 
    </summary> 
    <paras> 
        <paraitemcount>2</paraitemcount> 
        <para> 
            <paraitem>1</paraitem> 
            <paratext>sample text 1</paratext> 
        </para> 
        <para> 
            <paraitem>2</paraitem> 
            <paratext>sample text 2</paratext> 
        </para> 
    </paras> 
</doc>");

            List<string> docs = xElement2.Descendants().Where(x => x.Parent.Name == "paras" && x.Name == "para").Select(x => x.Value).ToList();

so in your code I think it becomes:

 ...//
...//

DocParas = doc.Descendants().Where(x => x.Parent.Name == "paras" && x.Name == "para").Select(x => x.Value).ToList()                                  

                                    }