How can I save data from a Windows Form to an XML file?

Question

I pretty sure I have to create some sort of mold of what the XML file has to look like first, right?

Any help will be appreciated.

Answer 1

look at using Linq to xml - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387098.aspx there are tutorials here that will guide you through creating and querying an xml document.

Answer 2

One simple way to do this would be to create .NET classes that you put the data in and then use XmlSerializer to serialize the data to a file and then later deserialize back into an instance of the class and re-populate the form.

AS an example, if you have a form with customer data. To keep it short we will just have first name and last name. You can create a class to hold the data. Keep in mind this is just a simple example, you can store arrays and all kinds of complex/nested data like this.

public class CustomerData
{
  public string FirstName;
  public string LastName;
}

So save the data as XML your code will look something like this.

// Create an instance of the CustomerData class and populate
// it with the data from the form.
CustomerData customer = new CustomerData();
customer.FirstName = txtFirstName.Text;
customer.LastName = txtLastName.Text;

// Create and XmlSerializer to serialize the data to a file
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(CustomerData));
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream("Data.xml", FileMode.Create))
{
  xs.Serialize(fs, customer);
}

And loading the data back would be something like the following

CustomerData customer;
XmlSerializer xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(CustomerData));
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream("Data.xml", FileMode.Open))
{
  // This will read the XML from the file and create the new instance
  // of CustomerData
  customer = xs.Deserialize(fs) as CustomerData;
}

// If the customer data was successfully deserialized we can transfer
// the data from the instance to the form.
if (customer != null)
{
  txtFirstName.Text = customer.FirstName;
  txtLastName.Text = customer.LastName;
}

Answer 3

So, are you wanting to collect data from a user in a Windows form application and then write it out to an XML file (when they click OK)? If so, I'd check out the XmlTextWriter class ( http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.xml.xmltextwriter.aspx ).