Question

Can someone provide an example of how to send an xml from C# to SQL Server, and then loop on the xml in the stored procedure that got it, and update or enter line by line.

Answer 1

Check out the three-part series on SQL XML on 15seconds: http://www.15seconds.com/Issue/050803.htm.

I would personally use the SQL XQuery functions to shred apart your XML into bits and pieces and store those in SQL Server.

If you have something like:

<data>
  <person>
     <name>Jones</name>         
     <firstname>Peter</firstname>
  </person>
  <person>
     <name>Smith</name>         
     <firstname>Frank</firstname>
  </person>
<data>

you can write something like:

SELECT
   Data.Person.value('(name)[1]', 'varchar(20)') as 'Name',
   Data.Person.value('(firstname)[1]', 'varchar(20)') as 'First Name'
FROM 
   @XmlVar.nodes('/data/person') As Data(Person)

So basically, the .nodes function shreds your XML into a “pseudo-table” Data.Person – each <person> entry becomes one row in the table.

With the .value() function, you can extract single values from those shredded XML nodes. You now have a bunch of varchar(20) fields, that can be e.g. inserted into a table.

This method works well if your XML is fairly small (a few hundred entries). If you have huge XML files, you might want to investigate other methods, such as XML Bulkload.