Question

I am a beginner in c#, I created one dataGridView1 in a Form to which I added some rows and columns (without using DataSet and Datatable). Now I need to send the data of dataGridView1 to an xml file. The xml file should update whenever I click on that button. I need to do this without using Datatable (or tables). I tried the below code (not working)

OnButtonClick

        XmlTextWriter newXml = new XmlTextWriter("d:/newXML.xml", Encoding.UTF8);
        DataSet ds = new DataSet(dataGridView1.Rows.ToString()); /* May be I am missing something here */
        ds.WriteXml(newXml);

xml file is created successfully but showing <System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewRowCollection /> in it.

If I add BindingSource bs = (BindingSource)dataGridView1.DataSource; before DataSet, it is showing error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”

Note: If the xml file is not their then it should create one.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can instantiate a DataTable and populate it from your dataGridView1 control:

        DataTable table = new DataTable("Customers");
        // copy the correct structure from datagridview to the table
        foreach (DataGridViewColumn column in dataGridView1.Columns)
        {
            table.Columns.Add(column.Name, typeof(string));
        }

        // populate the datatable from datagridview
        for (int rowIndex = 0; rowIndex < dataGridView1.Rows.Count; rowIndex++)
        {
            table.Rows.Add();
            for (int columnIndex = 0; columnIndex < dataGridView1.Columns.Count; columnIndex++)
            {
                table.Rows[rowIndex][columnIndex] = dataGridView1[rowIndex, columnIndex].Value;
            }
        }

then continue with the rest of your code:

    DataSet ds = new DataSet();
    ds.Tables.Add(table);
    ds.WriteXml("d:/newXML.xml", System.Data.XmlWriteMode.IgnoreSchema);