CODEWITHSUNDEEP
entity-frameworklinq-to-entitieslinq-to-xmliqueryable
Martin
Martin

Reputation: 24318

Transforming data retrieved from LINQ (IQueryable) to XML?

I presume this is possible? Basically i am receiving using LINQ (LINQ2Entities Entity Framework) data and return it to an IQUERYABLE once i this data i need to transform it to XML in a Memory Stream and a physical file on the hard disk - streamwriter??

Does anyone know if this is possible?

Any help really appreciated

Do i need to use LINQtoXML to accomplish this?

Any examples or tutorials anybody knows of would be great.

Thanks again

EDIT

After a little bit of investigation i think i require a XML Serializer for LINQ2Entities / IQueryable??

Upvotes: 1

Views: 4316

Answers (3)

dball
dball

Reputation: 374

I know this question is a old, but I wanted to show my solution to this problem.

public static string CreateXml<T>(IQueryable<T> thisQueryable)
    {
        var thisList = thisQueryable.ToList();
        var xmlResult = "";
        using (var stringWriter = new StringWriter())
        {
            using (var xmlWriter = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter))
            {
                var serializer = new XmlSerializer(typeof(List<T>));
                serializer.Serialize(xmlWriter, thisList);
            }
            xmlResult = stringWriter.ToString();
        }
        return xmlResult;
    }

Basically this just takes your IQueryable<T> and serializes it to XML and returns that XML as a string.

Then you'd basically take that string and....

var xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
xmlDoc.Load(xmlResult);

Hope this helps for any future visitors.

Upvotes: 1

Andrew Kinnear
Andrew Kinnear

Reputation: 21

Entity classes are by default Data Contracts, which means that they can be serialized based on the fields they contain:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.serialization.datacontractserializer.aspx

Upvotes: 2

Fr&#233;d&#233;ric Hamidi
Fr&#233;d&#233;ric Hamidi

Reputation: 263047

LINQ to XML is probably the best choice. You can use functional construction to create an XML tree in a single statement, like:

using (ContactEntities context = new ContactEntities()) {
    XDocument xml = new XDocument(
        new XElement("contacts",
            from contact in context.Contacts
            orderby contact.ContactId
            select new XElement("contact",
                new XAttribute("contactId", contact.ContactId),
                new XElement("firstName", contact.FirstName),
                new XElement("lastName", contact.LastName))));
    xml.Save(yourStream);
}

Upvotes: 2

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