Creating a child class of XElement that still keeps a reference to the original XElement and preserves the tree structure

Question

To start things off, let me explain that I'm working with a class that inherits the XElement class. The new class is called MXElement. It adds some new functionality to it for navigating through the XML tree, as well as some more information regarding attributes, but that's not particularly important. My problem is that I have an XML Tree filled with XElement objects.

However, when I create a new MXElement object from the XElement object before, it is just a copy of that object. This means that any changes that I make to this object will not effect the original tree.

I suppose what I'm asking for is a way to build in the functionality for my MXElement class and keep references to the original XElement objects. If possible, I would really prefer to keep MXElement a child class instead of building a lot of extension methods for XElement.

Answer 1

I reworked the entire idea and instead of using a child class, I used XPath to modify the tree.

For future ideas, I would like to know if there is still a solution to my original problem, but this is the solution I chose for my current problem.