I'm writing a Windows service in C#. I've got an XmlWriter which is contains the output of an XSLT transformation. I need to get the XML into an XMLElement object to pass to a web service.
What is the best way to do this?
You do not need an intermediate string, you can create an XmlWriter that writes directly into an XmlNode:
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
using (XmlWriter xw = doc.CreateNavigator().AppendChild()) {
// Write to `xw` here.
// Nodes written to `xw` will not appear in the document
// until `xw` is closed/disposed.
}
and pass xw as the output of the transform.
NB. Some parts of the xsl:output will be ignored (e.g. encoding) because the XmlDocument will use its own settings.
Well, an XmlWriter doesn't contain the output; typically, you have a backing object (maybe a StringBuilder or MemoryStream) that is the dumping place. In this case, StringBuilder is probably the most efficient... perhaps something like:
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(sb))
{
// TODO write to writer via xslt
}
string xml = sb.ToString();
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(xml);
XmlElement el = doc.DocumentElement;