Getting all the text from a web call

Question

I have the following code and it does what I want it to do. It gets XML data from a web call and puts it in an object.

string url = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings[CONFIGURATION_KEY_XE_COM_URL];

        var serialiser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(xedatafeed));

        var settings = new XmlReaderSettings {XmlResolver = null, DtdProcessing = DtdProcessing.Parse};

        var reader = XmlReader.Create(url, settings);

        var feed = (xedatafeed) serialiser.Deserialize(reader);

        return feed;

The issue is that I want to get a string representation of this data as well and doing feed.ToString() almost gives me all the data but not everything. There are two things missing

1. The <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> declaration
2. The DTD declaration that came along with the response.

I'd like these two things as well. I had to exclude the DTD declaration as it was not required for deserialisation into an object and it caused an error when I didn't exclude it. What's the cleanest way to get the full response given the above code?

Answer 1

In my experience, it eaiser to either add the declaration to the string after you have the result from the webservice, or declare it it programatically.

Method 1 - Add XML declaration after reciept of data

string xmlStr = string.format(@" < ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"? > {0}", WebServiceStringResult)

Then you can create a new XML Document object from the concatenated string with :

YourXmlDocumentObject.ReadXML(xmlStr) 

1. And then loop over or xpath out the desired values. or
2. Cast / Manipulate the YourXmlDocumentObject as required.

Method 2 - Programmatically add the XML/DTD declarations after reciept of data

In your new XmlDocument object, set the Properties to match your XML version and DTD information.

Finally, just add your webservice result string with:

YourXmlDocumentObject.ReadXML(WebServiceStringResult);

Note: Soap 1.1 and 1.2 will fall over with the declaration as part of an embedded request. ie the declaration is inside your one of your web methods.

~ ^i'm still learning to use this poxy editor, sorry ~