17.3 Other .NET XML Classes
The .NET framework provides a full complement
of classes for XML manipulation, which are found in the
System.Xml family of namespaces (see Table 17-5).
Table 17-5. XML classes in .NET
XmlDocument
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An in-memory representation of an XML document. You can navigate
freely through its structure, adding, removing, inserting, or
modifying nodes.
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XmlSchema
|
An in-memory representation of an XML schema document.
|
|
XmlTextReader and XmlTextWriter
|
Allows you to quickly retrieve XML data from or save it to a file or
stream. These classes provide optimized forward-only access.
|
XmlValidatingReader
|
Similar to XmlReader in that it provides read-only, forward-only
access to an XML file or a stream. Unlike
XmlReader, XmlValidatingReader
throws an exception if the XML document violates the rules in a
specified schema.
|
XslTransform
|
Allows you to perform XSLT transformations to change an in-memory XML
document to another XML document.
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These classes offer XML-specific functionality that
isn't directly available through the ADO.NET
objects. For example, if you load a serialized
DataSet using an XML file and XSD schema, you may
not receive a warning if the XML document violates the schema;
typically, you'll just lose some of the data. In
cases in which you aren't sure if the XML file fits
a given schema (or, in other words, you aren't sure
that the data in an XML file pertains to a given table or a given
version of that table), you can run through the XML file with the
XmlValidatingReader before loading it into the
DataSet.
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