Question

I am posting to a website to get data back. The site returns it as an xml. I am able to get the data into a string. But what i really want to do is to have each item in the xml in a different string field.

Sub lookup(ByVal Source As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
  Dim wData As String
  wData = WRequest("http://PostToThisSite.com", "POST","str=31&Password=pn&UserID=Q&Postcode="+txtPcode.Text)       
  Response.Write(wData)
End Sub

Function WRequest(URL As String, method As String, POSTdata As String) As String
    Dim responseData As String = ""
      Try
        Dim hwrequest As Net.HttpWebRequest = Net.Webrequest.Create(URL)
        hwrequest.Accept = "*/*"
        hwrequest.AllowAutoRedirect = true
        hwrequest.UserAgent = "http_requester/0.1"
        hwrequest.Timeout = 60000
        hwrequest.Method = method
        If hwrequest.Method = "POST" Then
          hwrequest.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
          Dim encoding As New Text.ASCIIEncoding() 'Use UTF8Encoding for XML requests
          Dim postByteArray() As Byte = encoding.GetBytes(POSTdata)
          hwrequest.ContentLength = postByteArray.Length
          Dim postStream As IO.Stream = hwrequest.GetRequestStream()
          postStream.Write(postByteArray, 0, postByteArray.Length)
          postStream.Close()
        End If
        Dim hwresponse As Net.HttpWebResponse = hwrequest.GetResponse()
        If hwresponse.StatusCode = Net.HttpStatusCode.OK Then
          Dim responseStream As IO.StreamReader = _
            New IO.StreamReader(hwresponse.GetResponseStream())
          responseData = responseStream.ReadToEnd()
        End If
        hwresponse.Close()
        Catch e As Exception
          responseData = "An error occurred: " & e.Message
        End Try
      Return responseData
End Function

The above code works and writes out a line…

Some Road City LU1 5QG

The Xml being returned is ..

<Address xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://site.co.uk/">
  <strOrganisation /> 
  <strProperty /> 
  <strStreet>Some Road</strStreet> 
  <strLocality /> 
  <strTown>City</strTown> 
  <strCounty /> 
  <strPostcode>LU1 5QG</strPostcode> 
  <strDPS /> 

I want to be able to split these fields and set them to different text boxes on the page…help?

Answer 1

Load the xml string into an XmlDocument and extract the values with XPath:

Dim doc = new XmlDocument()
doc.LoadXml(yourXmlString)
Dim nsm = new XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable)
nsm.AddNamespace("a", "http://site.co.uk/")
txtStreet.Text = doc.SelectSingleNode("/a:Address/a:strStreet", nsm).InnerText

Here’s a working snippet:

Dim doc = New XmlDocument()
doc.LoadXml("<Address xmlns:xsd=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"" xmlns:xsi=""http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"" xmlns=""http://site.co.uk/""><strOrganisation /> <strProperty /> <strStreet>Some Road</strStreet> <strLocality /> <strTown>City</strTown> <strCounty /> <strPostcode>LU1 5QG</strPostcode><strDPS /></Address>")
Dim nsm = New XmlNamespaceManager(doc.NameTable)
nsm.AddNamespace("a", "http://site.co.uk/")
Dim streetValue = doc.SelectSingleNode("/a:Address/a:strStreet", nsm).InnerText

Some things to note:

1. For XPath lookups, if your xml has a namespace you’ll need to add it to an
   XmlNameSpaceManager created from your XmlDocument’s NameTable.
2. If you don’t want to
   bother with that, you can walk the node collections manually via
   doc.ChildNodes[0].ChildNodes[0] etc.