Writing XML to memory instead of disk

Question

How do i go about writing the results of a FOR XML PATH stored procedure into memory rather than a file on disk?

Current way of doing things:

private  void GetChartData(string OC_Ttl1, string OC_Ttl2, string OC_OL31)
{
    OC_Ttl_1 = OC_Ttl1;
    OC_Ttl_2 = OC_Ttl2;
    OC_OL3_1 = OC_OL31;
    //Output xml
    DataSet orgDataSet = new DataSet();
    orgDataSet.ReadXml(cmd_Org.ExecuteXmlReader(), XmlReadMode.Auto);
    orgDataSet.WriteXml("InputXMLFiles/" + OC_OL3_1.Replace(" ", 
        "_").Replace("/", "-") + ".xml");
}

Instead of writing the file to disk that other methods then operate on, i want to have this method return the xml to memeory.

I assume that this would be far faster than writing to disk....

Answer 1

You have an XmlReader - you can do all sorts of things. For example

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
using(XmlReader xr = cmd_Org.ExecuteXmlReader()) {
    doc.Load(xr);
}
// TODO: play with "doc" with xpath etc

Answer 2

DataSet.WriteXml has lots of overloads - you can write to a stream (including a MemoryStream) and a writer (including a StringWriter). That's assuming you really want to go via a DataSet - if you're happy getting the XML directly without using a DataSet then just use Marc's suggestions.

Answer 3

You can call the overload of WriteXml that writes to a stream, and use a MemoryStream, although you may mean that you want the XML as a big long string.