Question

I am using ASP.Net 2.0 and trying to display transformed xml data using GridView and XMLDataSource at run time.

Here is my xml data (Input.xml):

<catalog>
<cd>
    <title>Empire Burlesque</title>
    <artist>Bob Dylan</artist>
    <country>USA</country>
    <company>Columbia</company>
    <price>10.90</price>
    <year>1985</year>
</cd>
<cd>
    <title>Hide your heart</title>
    <artist>Bonnie Tyler</artist>
    <country>UK</country>
    <company>CBS Records</company>
    <price>9.90</price>
    <year>1988</year>
</cd>
<cd>
    <title>Greatest Hits</title>
    <artist>Dolly Parton</artist>
    <country>USA</country>
    <company>RCA</company>
    <price>9.90</price>
    <year>1982</year>
</cd>
<cd>
    <title>Still got the blues</title>
    <artist>Gary Moore</artist>
    <country>UK</country>
    <company>Virgin records</company>
    <price>10.20</price>
    <year>1990</year>
</cd>
</catalog>

And here is the transform (Transform.xslt):

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
<xsl:output omit-xml-declaration="yes" indent="yes"/>
<xsl:template match="/">
    <CDCatalog>
        <xsl:apply-templates/>
    </CDCatalog>
</xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="cd">
  <CD>
  <xsl:apply-templates select="*">
        </xsl:apply-templates>
  </CD>
</xsl:template>


<xsl:template match="catalog/cd/*">
            <xsl:attribute name="{local-name()}">
        <xsl:value-of select="."/>
    </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

And for your reference this would be the transformed xml:

<CDCatalog>
<CD title="Empire Burlesque" artist="Bob Dylan" country="USA" company="Columbia" price="10.90" year="1985"/>
<CD title="Hide your heart" artist="Bonnie Tyler" country="UK" company="CBS Records" price="9.90" year="1988"/>
<CD title="Greatest Hits" artist="Dolly Parton" country="USA" company="RCA" price="9.90" year="1982"/>
<CD title="Still got the blues" artist="Gary Moore" country="UK" company="Virgin records" price="10.20" year="1990"/>
</CDCatalog>

Now this what I am doing in my C# code (GridView1 is created on .aspx page):

        XmlDataSource xmlDS = new XmlDataSource();
        xmlDS.EnableCaching = false;
        xmlDS.DataFile = "~/Input.xml";
        xmlDS.TransformFile = "~/Transform.xslt";
        xmlDS.XPath = "/CDCatalog/CD";
        GridView1.DataSourceID = xmlDS.ID;
        GridView1.DataBind();
        GridView1.Visible = true;

I do not see any data in the GridView. I looked up quite a bit on the internet but they generally talk about doing this sort of thing at design time in the aspx page but not at run time with in the code. I am not sure if this is a limitation on GridView/XMLDataSource binding or if I am doing something wrong. I appreciate any help on this.
Thanks, Srinivas

Answer 1

Simply change this line:

GridView1.DataSourceID = xmlDS.ID;

to this:

GridView1.DataSource = xmlDS;