XPATH removing nodes from file??

dparsons · February 27th, 2007, 05:21 PM

Hello everyone,
This seems to be a somewhat odd problem that I am having so I hope someone can shed some light on the subject. I have a specialized XML file that implements XFDL (it is a source document for IBM's Workplace Forms) and it is structured much like that of a plain run of the mill XML document albeit its DTD defines alot of custom tags.

Here is my situation: These files are to be uploaded through a Webform and stored in an image column inside of SQL Server. This protion of the application works wonderfully, however, before I get to this step I have to open the file and grab a piece of data from a particular node.

Since this file doesn't exist on the file system, I am opening the file from the input stream such as this:

Code:

XmlTextReader xtr = new XmlTextReader(userPostedFile.InputStream);
XPathDocument xDoc = new XPathDocument(xtr);
XPathNavigator xNav = xDoc.CreateNavigator();
XPathNodeIterator xIter = xNav.Select("//PAGE1");

This works fine and I am able to load the entire file into the XPathDocument and the node that I need is a child of <PAGE1></PAGE1>

So I wrote a loop:

Code:

while (xIter.MoveNext())
{
//loop till we get to the node <ClientNo></ClientNo>
}

However, I never reached the ClientNo node so I setup a hook right before the begining of this loop to see how many times it executed and, to my suprise, it didn't execute at all.

I then added this directly before the loop to see what data my Iterator was holding:

Code:

Response.Clear();
Response.ContentType = "text/xml";
Response.Write(xIter.Current.ToString());
Response.End();

This errored on me when it went to display as IE said it was not a valid XML document, however just doing

Code:

Response.Write(xIter.Current.ToString());

Writes out the entire file to the screen void of all Tags.

A sample of the file looks like this:

Code:

<PAGE1>
<navigation></navigation>
<FormProviderAgency>CSS</FormProviderAgency>
<ClientName readonly="true">Artifical Client</ClientName>
<ClientNo>2006821</ClientNo>
<DateOfAdmission>20060330</DateOfAdmission>
<PresentingProblem>Test symptoms</PresentingProblem>
...
</PAGE1>

But it literally gets wrote out as:CSSArtifical Client200682120060330Test symptoms

Does anyone have any idea as to why all of the tags would be seemingly stripped away? Does it have to do with the fact that I am working with it as a Stream as opposed to opening a source document on the filesystem? (Though I am not sure why that would make any difference.)

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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dparsons · February 27th, 2007, 05:37 PM

>< Upon testing this a little farther, I created a text file and dumped all of the data into that text file and , upon opening the file, the data was persisted exactly as it appears in the source document?

I could turn around and use this file as the source document for my XPathDocument, however, I would like to handle everything in memory without writing a file down to the server.

Any thoughts?

================================================== =========
Read this if you want to know how to get a correct reply for your question:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
^^Took that from planoie's profile^^
^^Modified text taken from gbianchi profile^^
================================================== =========
Technical Editor for: Professional Search Engine Optimization with ASP.NET
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyT...470131470.html

Discussion:
http://p2p.wrox.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=56429