XmlTextWriter是写Xml数据的最佳方法吗

Question

I have a list of products I want to generate xml for currently all the products are held in a List<> object....

 List<Product> products= DataAccess.GetProducts();
            XmlTextWriter writer = new XmlTextWriter(@"C:\ProductsToXml.xml", null);

            writer.WriteComment("Nick's Test Products To Xml.");

            writer.WriteStartElement("xml");

            writer.WriteStartElement("Product");
            writer.WriteStartElement("Name");
            writer.WriteString("Almonds");
            writer.WriteEndElement();

            //end for product
            writer.WriteEndElement();

            //end for xml
            writer.WriteEndElement();
            writer.Close();

Now I was gonna use this skeleton and loop through all the products and add xml like the skeleton shows above. The thing is there is gonna be alot of writer.WriteStartElement instructions because my products have alot of data in them. I am not sure if this is the best way to create an xml file or does it even matter? Is this approach ok for what I am doing? Basically taking a product object that has a bunch of properties in it and creating xml out of it thats all the purpose of this code is for.

Would you guys do it different?

Answer 1

What about using XmlSerializer ?

See also: Introducing XML serialization @ MSDN and Changing the XML structure generated by XmlSerializer in C# .

Answer 2

I think there are two options, one use a custom XmlSerializer for List<Product> or, more straightforward use Linq to XML to serialize your products:

List<Product> products = new List<Product>();
products.Add(new Product() { Id =1, Name="Foo"});
products.Add(new Product() { Id =2, Name="Bar"});

XElement xDoc = new XElement("Products", products.Select(p => new XElement("Product", 
                                                         new XAttribute("id", p.Id), 
                                                         new XAttribute("name", p.Name))));
xDoc.Save(@"testOut.xml");

Output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Products>
  <Product id="1" name="Foo" />
  <Product id="2" name="Bar" />
</Products>

Edit:

Composition is pretty easy in Linq to XML - so if I wanted an outer node of "Stuff" I can just prepend that node (and add a bracket at the end of course):

XElement xDoc = new XElement("Stuff", 
                             new XElement("Products", products.Select(p => new XElement("Product", 
                                                                           new XAttribute("id", p.Id), 
                                                                           new XAttribute("name", p.Name)))));

you can just duplicate this approach for your "Categories" list, just have new XElement("Categories") ... and so on.

Answer 3

I have this in my code:

XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(ObservableCollection<Item>));
TextWriter textWriter = new StreamWriter(@"items.xml");
serializer.Serialize(textWriter, items);
textWriter.Close();

which creates an .xml files with the root of 'arrayofitems'.

Answer 4

How about making use of LINQ for serializing data? There are several articles on the net. Here is one. http://kiranpatils.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/generic-list-to-xml-using-linq/