In This Topic
The Simple API for XML (SAX) model provides fast, forward-only memory efficient way for reading and writing of XML data. It is very suitable for large XML files, because only the current XML token is kept in memory (and not the whole document as in the XML Document Object Model), which makes the process consume a negligible amount of memory no matter how big the processed XML document is. A drawback of the model is that, because it does not read the whole document at once, it does not provide any XML validation capabilities.
Reading XML Data
To read XML data using the SAX model, you can take advantage of the NXmlReader class. Call its static Create method passing the stream of XML data you want to read to it. Then you should call the Read method until it returns true and inspect each read node. The properties of interest are Name, Value and NodeType. The Name and Value properties have different meaning depending on the node type:
| Node Type |
Name |
Value |
| StartTag |
The name of the tag. |
null |
| EndTag |
The name of the tag. |
null |
| Declaration |
The name of the declaration. |
null |
| Text |
null |
The text content of the text node. |
| Comment |
null |
The content of the comment. |
| CData |
null |
The content of the CData. |
The following example demonstrates how to read a XML data stream with the Nevron XML reader:
| NXmlReader Example |
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NXmlReader xmlReader = NXmlReader.Create(stream);
while (xmlReader.Read())
{
Console.WriteLine("Node type: " + xmlReader.NodeType.ToString());
Console.WriteLine("Name: " + xmlReader.Name);
Console.WriteLine("Value: " + xmlReader.Value);
Console.WriteLine("==============================");
}
|
Writing XML Data
To write XML data using the SAX model, use the NXmlWriterClass. Call its static Create method passing the stream to write to and optionally an encoding (by default UTF-8 encoding is used). Then use the different Write methods to write various XML tokens to the output stream. The following example demonstrates how to write some XML data to a stream:
| NXmlWriter Example |
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public class Employee
{
public Employee(int id, string firstName, string lastName, int salary)
{
this.Id = id;
this.FirstName = firstName;
this.LastName = lastName;
this.Salary = salary;
}
public int Id;
public string FirstName;
public string LastName;
public int Salary;
}
...
Employee[] employees = new Employee[4];
employees[0] = new Employee(1, "David", "Smith", 10000);
employees[1] = new Employee(3, "Mark", "Drinkwater", 30000);
employees[2] = new Employee(4, "Norah", "Miller", 20000);
employees[3] = new Employee(12, "Cecil", "Walker", 120000);
MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream();
NXmlWriter writer = NXmlWriter.Create(ms);
writer.WriteStartDocument();
writer.WriteStartElement("Employees");
foreach (Employee employee in employees)
{
writer.WriteStartElement("Employee");
writer.WriteElementString("ID", employee.Id.ToString());
writer.WriteElementString("FirstName", employee.FirstName);
writer.WriteElementString("LastName", employee.LastName);
writer.WriteElementString("Salary", employee.Salary.ToString());
writer.WriteEndElement();
}
writer.WriteEndElement(); // Close the "Employees" element
writer.WriteEndDocument();
|
The result of this piece of code will be the following XML file:
| NXmlWriter Example Output |
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Employees>
<Employee>
<ID>1</ID>
<FirstName>David</FirstName>
<LastName>Smith</LastName>
<Salary>10000</Salary>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<ID>3</ID>
<FirstName>Mark</FirstName>
<LastName>Drinkwater</LastName>
<Salary>30000</Salary>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<ID>4</ID>
<FirstName>Norah</FirstName>
<LastName>Miller</LastName>
<Salary>20000</Salary>
</Employee>
<Employee>
<ID>12</ID>
<FirstName>Cecil</FirstName>
<LastName>Walker</LastName>
<Salary>120000</Salary>
</Employee>
</Employees>
|
See Also