How to create xml file from a list of objects

Question

I defined 3 classes:

public class PublishedPage
{
    public string Action { get; private set; }
    public string PageGuid { get; set; }
    public List<string> SearchableProperties { get; set; }

    public PublishedPage()
    {
        Action = "Published";
        SearchableProperties = new List<string>();
    }
}

public class DeletedPage
{
    public string Action { get; private set; }
    public string PageGuid { get; set; }

    public DeletedPage()
    {
        Action = "Deleted";
    }
}

public class MovedPage
{
    public string Action { get; private set; }
    public string PageGuid { get; set; }
    public string OldParentGuid { get; set; }
    public string NewParentGuid { get; set; }

    public MovedPage()
    {
        Action = "Moved";
    }
}

Somewhere in code I have something like this:

List<PublishedPage> publishedPages = GetPublishedPages();
List<MovedPage> movedPages = GetMovedPages();
List<DeletedPage> deletedPages = GetDeletedPages();

Now I want to create a XML file containing these 3 collections but don't know how.
XML should be like this:

<PublishedPages>
   <PublishedPage>
      <Action>Published</Action>
      <PageGuid>.....</PageGuid>
      <SearchableProperties>
         <Name>Name 1</Name>
         <Name>Name 2</Name>
      </SearchablePeoperties>
   </PublishedPage>
   <PublishedPage>
   ...
   <PublishedPage>
</PublishedPages>
<MovedPages>
...
</MovedPages>
<DeletedPages>
...
</DeletedPages>

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you!

Solution 1

Even though the XmlSerializer is the easiest one, if you already know the schema you can do it with a bit of linq to xml too:

XElement element = 
    new XElement("PublishedPages",
        (from page in publishedPages 
             select new XElement("PublishedPage",
                 new XElement("Action", page.Action),
                 new XElement("PageGuid",page.PageGuid),
                 new XElement("SearchableProperties",
                     (from property in page.SearchableProperties
                      select new XElement("Name",property)))
                      )
         )
     );

Solution 2

Serialization is fairly slow. performance -wise. A similar approach would be something like this:

StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter();
XmlTextWriter xmltextWriter = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter) {Formatting = Formatting.Indented};

// Start document
xmltextWriter.WriteStartDocument();
xmltextWriter.WriteStartElement("ROOT");

foreach (PublishedPage page in publishedPages)
{
    //Create a page element
    xmltextWriter.WriteStartElement("Page");
    xmltextWriter.WriteAttributeString("Action", page.Action);
    xmltextWriter.WriteAttributeString("SearchableProperties", page.SearchableProperties);
    xmltextWriter.WriteEndElement();
}


// Same for the other lists 
// End document
xmltextWriter.WriteEndElement();
xmltextWriter.Flush();
xmltextWriter.Close();
stringWriter.Flush();

Comments

[Bartosz]

It has other benefits as well - if you need your XML structured in a certain way and if xmlserializer is a too heavy canon for a small target:)