LINQ to XML: Creating an XElement

In the last post, we showed how to create a simple XML document in which the data were entered from a DataGrid. We gave the code for constructing the XML as follows:

    private XElement XmlFromLibrary()
    {
      ObservableCollection<Book> library = (ObservableCollection<Book>)((ObjectDataProvider)FindResource("LibraryGrid")).Data;
      XElement libraryElement =
        new XElement("LIBRARY",
          library.Select(book =>
            new XElement("BOOK",
              new XElement("AUTHOR", book.Author),
              new XElement("TITLE", book.Title),
              new XElement("PRICE", book.Price))));
      return libraryElement;
    }

The ‘library’ is fetched from a Windows resource defined in the XAML, with this resource being bound to the DataGrid (see earlier post for full details).

In writing this code, we glossed over some of the details of how the XElement is built. In fact, we used several techniques in this code that could do with further explanation.

The basic form of an XElement constructor is

XElement(XName name, params object[] content);

The first parameter gives the name of the XElement, which is used as the tag when writing out the XML. Usually, we’ll just enter a string here, and rely on the fact that the XElement constructor will convert this into an XName internally so we don’t need to worry about it.

The second parameter uses C#’s params keyword, which allows a variable number (one or more) of arguments to be passed to the constructor. As the data type of the content is just ‘object’, any data type  can be passed as the content of an XElement, and it’s here that the richness of the XElement class comes into play.

There are 8 specific data types that are handled in special ways when passed in as the content.

1. A string is, as you might expect, just used as is as the content of the XML tag. (In fact, a string is converted into an XText object before it is used.)
2. XText: This is a special class which is added as a child node of the XElement, but its value, which is a string, is used as the XElement’s text content.
3. XCData: This allows insertion of the XML CData type, which consists of unparsed character data. Such strings may contain characters such as > and &, which ordinarily have a special meaning in XML syntax, but would be ignored here.
4. XElement: The content can be another XElement, which is added as a child node to the parent XElement.
5. XAttribute: This object is added as a child node, and represents an attribute of the parent node.
6. XComment: Allows a comment to be attached to the XElement.
7. IProcessingInstruction: Allows a processing instruction to be added to the XElement. (You don’t need to worry about these for most XML that you’ll write, but I may get back to them at some point.)
8. IEnumerable: This is the magic data type, since it allows collections of data, such as those produced by LINQ query operations, to be passed in as content. The elements in the collection are iterated over, and each element is treated as a separate parameter. We used this feature in the code above to insert a list of Book objects into the XML using a LINQ Select() call.

In addition, you can also pass a null as the content (which does have its uses, though we won’t go into that here).

Finally, if the content is any other data type, the XElement will call the ToString() for that data type and use that as the content. This can cause some confusion, since there are some other LINQ to XML classes (such as XDocument) that are used to attach properties to the XML file that will be accepted as content for XElement, but rather than having the expected effect, XElement will just call its ToString() method and use that as content.

As a simple example, here’s some code that creates an XElement using most of the data types above as content:

using System;
using System.Xml.Linq;

namespace LinqXml03
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      XElement document = new XElement("Library",
        new XComment("This is a test library"),
        new XElement("Program", new Program()),
        new XElement("Book",
          new XElement("Author", "Isaac Asimov"),
          new XElement("Title", "I, Robot"),
          new XAttribute("Pages", 357)),
        new XElement("Book",
          new XElement("Author", "Samuel R. Delaney"),
          new XElement("Title", "Nova"),
          new XAttribute("Pages", 293)),
        new XCData("This contains a > and a & character"),
        new XText("This also contains a > and a & character"));
      Console.WriteLine(document);
   }
  }
}

This produces the output:

<Library>
  <!--This is a test library-->
  <Program>LinqXml03.Program</Program>
  <Book Pages="357">
    <Author>Isaac Asimov</Author>
    <Title>I, Robot</Title>
  </Book>
  <Book Pages="293">
    <Author>Samuel R. Delaney</Author>
    <Title>Nova</Title>
  </Book><![CDATA[This contains a > and a & character]]>This also contains a &gt; and a &amp; character</Library>

The top level XElement has the name ‘Library’. Its first content is a comment, which is written with the <!–…–> delimiters. Next, we’ve added a content object of type Program (that is, the class in which this program is written). The output is produced as a normal XElement tag, but the ToString() method is called from the Program class since it’s not one of the data types that has special meaning as an XElement content. The default ToString() method for a class just produces that class’s full pathname, which in this case is LinqXml03.Program.

Next, we add a couple of Book elements, each of which contains a couple of other XElements for the author and title. We’ve also added an XAttribute for the number of pages in the book.

The last two lines demonstrate the difference between XCData and XText. The XCData reproduces the given text exactly, and encloses it within the <![…]]> delimiters used for CData. The XText places the text as the content of the Library tag, and translates special characters into the XML code, so that > become &gt; and & becomes &amp;.

We’ve already seen an example of using IEnumerable in the code fragment at the top of this post.

LINQ for XML – the basics

LINQ provides a library of classes and methods that allow XML to be generated and imported quite easily (certainly more easily than with previous .NET libraries).

We’ll assume the reader is familiar with the basics of XML syntax and dive in with a simple little program that allows the user to enter some details for books in a library, then store this data to a disk file as XML (and of course to read in data from an XML file and display it).

The GUI is a WPF DataGrid and a menu for handling file operations, as shown:

We’ll represent the data internally using a Book class to represent each book, and an ObservableCollection to represent the collection of books. The data structures are similar to those that we used in discussing data binding to lists and combo boxes. The Book class is a bit simpler than it was there:

using System.ComponentModel;
namespace LinqXml02
{
  public class Book : INotifyPropertyChanged
  {
    public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged;
    protected void Notify(string propName)
    {
      if (this.PropertyChanged != null)
      {
        PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propName));
      }
    }

    string author;

    public string Author
    {
      get { return author; }
      set
      {
        author = value;
        Notify("Author");
      }
    }

    string title;

    public string Title
    {
      get { return title; }
      set
      {
        title = value;
        Notify("Title");
      }
    }

    decimal price;

    public decimal Price
    {
      get { return price; }
      set
      {
        price = value;
        Notify("Price");
      }
    }

    public Book() { }
    public Book(string author, string title, decimal price)
    {
      this.author = author;
      this.title = title;
      this.price = price;
    }
  }
}

The ObservableCollection is created in a special class called Library:

using System;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;

namespace LinqXml02
{
  public class Library
  {
    Random rand = new Random();
    private decimal BookPrice()
    {
      decimal price = rand.Next(0, 5000) / 100m;
      return price;
    }

    public ObservableCollection<Book> GetLibrary()
    {
      ObservableCollection<Book> library = new ObservableCollection<Book>();
      return library;
    }
  }
}

This class serves as a resource in the XAML file:

<Window x:Class="LinqXml02.MainWindow"
        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
        xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
        xmlns:local="clr-namespace:LinqXml02"
        Title="MainWindow" Height="350" Width="525">
    <Window.Resources>
        <ObjectDataProvider x:Key="LibraryGrid"
                            ObjectType="{x:Type local:Library}"
                            MethodName="GetLibrary"/>
    </Window.Resources>
    <Grid DataContext="{StaticResource LibraryGrid}" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch">
        <Grid.RowDefinitions>
            <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/>
            <RowDefinition/>
        </Grid.RowDefinitions>
        <Menu VerticalAlignment="Top">
            <MenuItem Header="_File">
                <MenuItem x:Name="saveMenuItem" Header="_Save" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="145" Click="saveMenuItem_Click"/>
                <MenuItem x:Name="saveAsMenuItem" Header="Save _as" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="145" Click="saveAsMenuItem_Click"/>
                <MenuItem x:Name="openMenuItem" Header="_Open" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="145" Click="openMenuItem_Click"/>
                <Separator HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="145"/>
                <MenuItem x:Name="exitMenuItem" Header="E_xit" HorizontalAlignment="Left" Width="145" Click="exitMenuItem_Click"/>
            </MenuItem>
        </Menu>
        <DataGrid x:Name="bookGrid" Grid.Row="1" ItemsSource="{Binding}" AutoGenerateColumns="False"  HorizontalAlignment="Stretch">
            <DataGrid.Columns>
                <DataGridTextColumn Header="Author" Binding="{Binding Author}" Width="45*"/>
                <DataGridTextColumn Header="Title" Binding="{Binding Title}"  Width="45*"/>
                <DataGridTextColumn Header="Price" Binding="{Binding Price}"  Width="10*"/>
            </DataGrid.Columns>
        </DataGrid>

    </Grid>
</Window>

On lines 7 to 9 we create the resource, then use it as the data context for the Grid on line 11. The DataGrid defined on line 25 uses this data context as the binding for its ItemsSource property, and then we define the three columns, each bound to a property in the Book class. We could have used the auto-generate column feature of a DataGrid, but that doesn’t allow us to customize the widths of the columns, which we’ve done here by assigning each of the Author and Title columns 45% of the horizontal width, with Price getting the remaining 10%.

With the data structures set up and the binding in place, we could run the program and enter some book data, and the data binding will automatically update the ObservableCollection as we enter data into the DataGrid. However, at this stage we have no way of saving the data thus entered. For that we introduce the XML.

First, we’ll have a look at the event handlers for the Save and Save As menu items.

    string saveFilename = "";
    private void saveAsMenuItem_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
      SaveFileDialog saveDialog = new SaveFileDialog();
      saveDialog.Filter = "XML file|*.xml";
      saveDialog.Title = "Save library";
      if (saveDialog.ShowDialog() == true)
      {
        saveFilename = saveDialog.FileName;
        saveMenuItem_Click(sender, e);
        Title = "Library - " + saveDialog.FileName;
      }
    }

    private void saveMenuItem_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
      if (saveFilename.Equals(""))
      {
        saveAsMenuItem_Click(sender, e);
      }
      else
      {
        XElement saveLibraryXml = XmlFromLibrary();
        saveLibraryXml.Save(saveFilename);
      }
    }

The SaveFileDialog (and OpenFileDialog) classes are in the old Microsoft.Win32 namespace, but they still seem to work well enough. In order to allow us to save changes to a currently open file, we have an auxiliary string called saveFilename. If this string has zero length, then we open the SaveFileDialog to get the user to select a filename. The dialog has a filter that displays only .xml files.

Once a file has been chosen, the saveMenuItem_Click() handler is called, and the method XmlFromLibrary() is called. We’ll consider this in a moment, but first we need to describe the XElement class.

In LINQ’s handling of XML, all XML tags are represented by XElement objects. There is no need for a separate, top-level document object in which to place the XElements; XElement itself can serve as the top level, and all lower levels.

Nested tags in the XML are represented simply as nested XElement objects. This gives the C# code a structure that is easy to understand for the human reader.

Now we can have a look at XmlFromLibrary():

    private XElement XmlFromLibrary()
    {
      ObservableCollection<Book> library = (ObservableCollection<Book>)((ObjectDataProvider)FindResource("LibraryGrid")).Data;
      XElement libraryElement =
        new XElement("LIBRARY",
          library.Select(book =>
            new XElement("BOOK",
              new XElement("AUTHOR", book.Author),
              new XElement("TITLE", book.Title),
              new XElement("PRICE", book.Price))));
      return libraryElement;
    }

After retrieving ‘library’ from the Windows resources, we create the XML representation of the library with a single C# statement. The top level object is libraryElement, which is given the tag LIBRARY. The second argument to its contructor is built using a LINQ Select() call on library. Remember that library consists of a list of Book objects, so we simply iterate through each Book in the list, and construct a new XElement for each Book. Within the Book’s XElement, we add 3 more XElements for the Author, Title and Price fields.

And that’s it. The code is very clean. Back in saveMenuItem_Click(), we simply call the Save() method from the XElement object to save the file to disk. The resulting file for the books shown in the picture above is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LIBRARY>
  <BOOK>
    <AUTHOR>Asimov, Isaac</AUTHOR>
    <TITLE>I, Robot</TITLE>
    <PRICE>3.50</PRICE>
  </BOOK>
  <BOOK>
    <AUTHOR>Niven, Larry</AUTHOR>
    <TITLE>Ringworld</TITLE>
    <PRICE>4.95</PRICE>
  </BOOK>
  <BOOK>
    <AUTHOR>Asimov, Isaac</AUTHOR>
    <TITLE>Foundation</TITLE>
    <PRICE>2.25</PRICE>
  </BOOK>
  <BOOK>
    <AUTHOR>Simak, Clifford D.</AUTHOR>
    <TITLE>Buckets of Diamonds</TITLE>
    <PRICE>5.00</PRICE>
  </BOOK>
</LIBRARY>

The Save() method produces the usual first line of an XML file, and then writes out the XML itself, all neatly indented.

To read the XML file back into the program, we need to construct the internal ObservableCollection from the XML. This is almost as easy as producing the XML in the first place. Here’s the code for the Open menu item, and the associated LibraryFromXml() method that reads the XML:

    private void openMenuItem_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e)
    {
      OpenFileDialog openDialog = new OpenFileDialog();
      openDialog.DefaultExt = ".xml";
      openDialog.Filter = "XML documents (.xml)|*.xml";
      bool? result = openDialog.ShowDialog();
      if (result == true)
      {
        XElement libraryXml = XElement.Load(openDialog.FileName);
        Title = "Library - " + openDialog.FileName;
        LibraryFromXml(libraryXml);
        saveFilename = openDialog.FileName;
      }
    }

    private void LibraryFromXml(XElement libraryXml)
    {
      ObservableCollection<Book> library = (ObservableCollection<Book>)((ObjectDataProvider)FindResource("LibraryGrid")).Data;
      library.Clear();
      var bookElements = libraryXml.Elements("BOOK");
      foreach (XElement book in bookElements)
      {
        Book addBook = new Book(
          (string)book.Element("AUTHOR"),
          (string)book.Element("TITLE"),
          (decimal)book.Element("PRICE"));
        library.Add(addBook);
      }
    }

In the openMenuItem_Click() handler, we use the static XElement.Load() method to read the XML from the file into an XElement.

In LibraryFromXml() we again retrieve the library resource and clear it of existing data. Then we call the Elements() method on the XElement to retrieve a list of BOOK tags. This produces an IEnumerable list of XElements for the BOOK objects in the original XML. For each of these, we simply create a Book object by extracting the AUTHOR, TITLE and PRICE XElements for each BOOK, and then add this Book object to the library. The data binding takes care of the rest, so the DataGrid is automatically updated to display the list of books we read in.

There’s a lot more that can be done with LINQ and XML, but this little example should show you that for saving and reading basic XML, LINQ is easy to use.

Code for this post available here.