What I dislike in System.Xml v2.0 (and v1.X for that matter) is a poor support for push-based XML processing. Somehow it's all about pull - XmlReader, while push - XmlWriter seems to be a second class citizen. For instance one can't populate XML into XPathDocument or XSLT stylesheet into XslCompiledTransform with XmlWriter. One can't deserialize an object from XML if XML is represented as XmlWriter etc. In a nutshell: XML producers in .NET write XML into XmlWriter, while XML consumers read XML from XmlReader. The problem with this mix of pull and push arises when one tries to pipeline a XML producer and a XML consumer, i.e. a component that writes to XmlWriter and another one which reads from XmlReader. Ooops! Think about feeding XML created with XSLT into SqlXml or deserializing an object from an XML modified by XSLT or chaining two XSLT transformations when output from the first one goes as input to the second one or generating XSLT stylesheet on the fly. Most of these problems can't be solved in .NET 2.0 in a streaming fashion and require interim buffering of the whole XML effectively killing scalability and performance. Look here and here. I'm really sorry to see interim buffering with serializing/reparsing involved as an XML pipelining solution in a modern technology like .NET 2.0.
As a matter of fact, XSLT chaining problem can be solved using XmlDocument, but alas it's still huge, slow and overkill for scenarios where read-only XML store is required.
Apparently this unfortunate state of the art has something to do with SAX vs XmlReader battles in early .NET days, which XmlReader definitely won. In .NET 1.X there wasn't even a standard way to write to XmlDocument using XmlWriter! Happily Chris Lovett came to the rescue with XmlNodeWriter.
An ultimate solution for the XML pipelining problem in .NET would be XmlWriterReader - a component that bridges XmlWriter and XmlReader. It can be implemented either by efficiently caching internally the whole stream of XmlWriter events and reading them after or by two-threaded synchronized XmlWriter/XmlReader. The good news is that it can be said for sure that soon such component will be implemented for the Mvp.Xml library. Stay tuned.
Still I wonder why all these hurdles. Let's take XPathDocument class. XSLT chaining problem could be solved be XPathDocument loadable from a XmlWriter. It's not. It accepts URI, Stream, TextWriter or XmlReader. But if you look inside XPathDocument you can see that it's constructed using XPathDocumentBuilder class, which implements XmlWriter! Put it another way: XPathDocument internally is constructed using only XmlWriter, but somehow it's impossible to populate it with your own XmlWriter. Weird, huh?
To prove it here is a little hackery showing it's feasible to populate XPathDocument with XmlWriter (it's a rude hack, don't use it):
//Create XPathDocumentBuilder
Type xpathDocBuilderType =
typeof(XPathDocument).Assembly.GetType(
"MS.Internal.Xml.Cache.XPathDocumentBuilder");
XPathDocument doc =
(XPathDocument)Activator.CreateInstance(
typeof(XPathDocument),
BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance,
null, new object[] { }, null);
ConstructorInfo xpathDocBuilderCtor =
xpathDocBuilderType.GetConstructors()[0];
XmlWriter xpathDocBuilder =
(XmlWriter)xpathDocBuilderCtor.Invoke(
new object[] { doc, null, "", null });
//Populate XPathDocument
xpathDocBuilder.WriteStartElement("foo");
xpathDocBuilder.WriteAttributeString("attr", "value");
xpathDocBuilder.WriteString("content");
xpathDocBuilder.WriteEndElement();
//Done
Console.WriteLine(doc.CreateNavigator().OuterXml);
The output is
<foo attr="value">content</foo>
I wonder why this useful functionality isn't exposed. Apparently the reason is the added complexity. That would require to expose XPathDocumentBuilder and probably move to Builder pattern of constructing XPathDocument altogether. Ok, I've opened a suggestion at the MSDN Feedback Center, let's see what Microsofties say.
Why not use a MemoryStream to create an XmlWriter, and then create the XPathDocument using the MemoryStream???
ms = new MemoryStream();
XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(ms);
// write your favorite XML doc
writer.Close();
ms.Position = 0;
XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument(ms);
voila
Robert
See my answer at the suggestion page.
Oleg,
Just wondering what you think of the MS reply to your suggestion!!