Using XML in Silverlight
XML is an important medium in the world of Silverlight especially where Web Services are involved. The .NET 3.5 that comes with Silverlight 2 omits some of the core XML objects that you will find in the full incarnation of .NET 3.5. There is however the XML Reader and Writer classes that allow you high speed access to reading and writing XML documents. In our sample on this page we use an XML reader to read a simple XML file and render the results to the page.
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Our example XML file looks like this, as you can:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<customers>
<customer id="10001" first="John" last="Smith" company="Donuts plc">jsmith@mymail.com</customer>
<customer id="10002" first="Rete" last="Bandy" company="This Is Bloggers Co.">rete@superbloggers.com</customer>
<customer id="10003" first="James" last="Bird" company="Timestone">james.bird@timestone.co.uk</customer>
<customer id="10004" first="Sarah" last="McCauly" company="Automated Snowmen Ltd">smccauly@automatedsnowmen.com</customer>
<customer id="10005" first="Pete" last="Rowan" company="Cooltec Consultants">pete.rowan@cooltec.com</customer>
</customers>
The XAML for this tutorial is very simple, we just have one listbox and is as follows:
<UserControl x:Class="XMLTutorial.Page"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
Width="400" Height="300">
<Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="White">
<ListBox x:Name="customersList" Width="400" Height="200" />
</Grid>
</UserControl>
In our XAML we have only one ListBox for this tutorial, all the processing is done in your C# code behind:
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.Xml;
namespace XMLTutorial
{
public partial class Page : UserControl
{
public Page()
{
InitializeComponent();
PopulateCustomersList();
}
private void PopulateCustomersList()
{
XmlReaderSettings settings = new XmlReaderSettings();
settings.XmlResolver = new XmlXapResolver();
XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create("Customers.xml");
reader.MoveToContent();
while (reader.Read())
{
if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.Element && reader.Name == "customer")
{
customersList.Items.Add(new ListBoxItem() { Content = reader.GetAttribute("last") +
", " + reader.GetAttribute("first") + " (" + reader.ReadInnerXml() + ")" });
}
if (reader.NodeType == XmlNodeType.EndElement && reader.Name == "customers")
{
break;
}
}
reader.Close();
}
}
}
In the above code we enter a while loop reading each Customer element and outputting the First, Last names and email address.
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