How can I use an XML file to select dyanmic templates for an ASP.net Repeater?

Question

I am developing an application that has a repeater that will use dynamic templates for each row based on the underlying DataItem (in this case a product). What I would like to do is have some sort of XML file that will store which templates are to be used with which templates, and then use a default template if there is not one specified for the product. My product catalog does not contain a particularly large number of products, but having to open and parse an XML file for each row would almost certainly have adverse performance effects. What I would like to do is have the ASP.net engine compile the entries in the XML file into some sort of global collection that can easily be accessed when needed. Ideally, the application would be able to determine when I have made changes to the file and would automatically recompile the collection and restart the application if necessary. If my understanding is correct, this is already how the engine deals with the web.config file.

Does anyone know if an approach like this is possible, and how I might be able to accomplish it?

Thanks,

Mike

Answer 1

Well you could likely open and parse the XML file on each page load without any significantly adverse performance issues. Toss the result in a page-level collection and for each repeater row, read from that. This will at least prevent you from having to manage a global collection with a file change update dependency.

I do use XML in similar ways, albeit for mostly non-critical company Intranet type applications, so I'd certainly say your approach isn't too awful. :) In my specific cases, I have ultimately put the XML in a global application level object, with the trade off being that I have to manually restart the application to re-load the XML, should it change.

If you do want to tackle your ideal scenario, I would look to store the XML templates in the Cache object and set up a CacheDependency on the XML file.