Question

I am writing a network server in C# .NET 4.0. There is a network TCP/IP connection over which I can receive complete XML elements. They arrive regularly and I need to process them immediately. Each XML element is a complete XML document in itself, so it has an opening element, several sub-nodes and a closing element. There is no single root element for the entire stream. So when I open the connection, what I get is like this:

<status>
    <x>123</x>
    <y>456</y>
</status>

Then some time later it continues:

<status>
    <x>234</x>
    <y>567</y>
</status>

And so on. I need a way to read the complete XML string until a status element is complete. I don’t want to do that with plain text reading methods because I don’t know in what formatting the data arrives. I can in no way wait until the entire stream is finished, as is often described elsewhere. I have tried using the XmlReader class but its documentation is weird, the methods don’t work out, the first element is lost and after sending the second element, an XmlException occurs because there are two root elements.

Answer 1

Try this:

var settings = new XmlReaderSettings
{
    ConformanceLevel = ConformanceLevel.Fragment
};

using (var reader = XmlReader.Create(stream, settings))
{
    while (!reader.EOF)
    {
        reader.MoveToContent();

        var doc = XDocument.Load(reader.ReadSubtree());

        Console.WriteLine("X={0}, Y={1}",
            (int)doc.Root.Element("x"),
            (int)doc.Root.Element("y"));

        reader.ReadEndElement();
    }
}