CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#xmlasp.net-mvcstringlinq-to-xml
tehdoommarine
tehdoommarine

Reputation: 2068

how to display human readable xml in an asp.net mvc view page

I have a string in a ASP.NET MVC details page with the value of 

<this><is sample = "attribute"><xml><power>!!!</power></xml><oh><yeah></yeah></oh></is></this>.

I want it to display as follows:

<this>
  <is sample = "attribute">
    <xml>
       <power> !!! </power>
    </xml>
    <oh>
       <yeah>
       </yeah>
    <oh>
  </is>
</this>

Things I have tried:

1: How to Display Formatted XML - best answer and richards answer

2: xmlwriter.writeraw();

3: basic linq-to-xml (i'm not very good with this)

EDIT: I am displaying the string as follows and was wondering if this may have something to do with it:

<%: *formatted string goes here* %>

Upvotes: 5

Views: 12891

Answers (5)

TheEmirOfGroofunkistan
TheEmirOfGroofunkistan

Reputation: 5654

from https://stackoverflow.com/a/16605336/1874 , here is a simple 3 line solution:

var xml = "<root><A><B>0</B><C>0</C></A><D><E>0</E></D></root>";

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
Console.WriteLine (doc.ToString());

or inline as

XDocument.Parse(xmlstring).ToString()

place the result inside of (for example inspect the code blocks on this StackOverflow page):

<pre></pre>

Upvotes: 1

Gavin Coates
Gavin Coates

Reputation: 1425

The problem is you are outputting text, which will then be interpreted by the browser in the default way that text is handled - it doesnt know that it is XML.

What you need is a library to correctly format the text using standard XML rules.

You could try Google Prettify - which is a Javascript library to format code (it supports XML as well as many other programming languages). There is also a .NET based formatter that you could use, I think it was written by Stack Overflow and open sourced - but I cannot find it right now.

Upvotes: 3

Samich
Samich

Reputation: 30105

I was doing it in this way:

protected string FormatXml(XmlNode xmlNode)
{        
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();

    // We will use stringWriter to push the formated xml into our StringBuilder bob.
    using (StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter(builder))
    {
        // We will use the Formatting of our xmlTextWriter to provide our indentation.
        using (XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter))
        {
            xmlTextWriter.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
            xmlNode.WriteTo(xmlTextWriter);
        }
    }

    return builder.ToString();
}

http://forums.asp.net/t/1145533.aspx/1

Upvotes: 7

VMAtm
VMAtm

Reputation: 28345

All your problems are because of all browsers are truncating the spaces in xml.
Try to use &nbsp; to draw intends or simply add the declaration of the xml to start of the page:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<this>
  <is sample = "attribute">
    <xml>
       <power> !!! </power>
    </xml>
    <oh>
       <yeah>
       </yeah>
    <oh>
  </is>
</this>

All modern browsers will handle this correctly.

Upvotes: 1

box86rowh
box86rowh

Reputation: 3415

try setting the content type to xml and add the xml header before your data, I use this simple prep function for my webservices, r is the Response object:

public void prepXml()
{
    r.AddHeader("Content-Type", "text/xml");
    r.Write("<?xml version=" + '"' + "1.0" + '"' + " encoding=" + '"' + "utf-8" + '"' + " ?>");
}

Upvotes: 0

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