Question

I have a class that processes XML files. It works, but the problem is that, everything is being processed in RAM. I need to do something (like using XmlWriter class) to make it save on HDD while creating a new XML file (the data is very large that’s why).

How to do that in the best way? I hope there’s no need to change XDocument into XmlDocument :/

e.g. – I have something like XML structure below and I want to add one node, save it into the file, dispose the element, then create a new node, save it… etc.

<root>
   <element no='1' />
   <element no='2' />
   <element no='3' />
   <element no='4' />
</root>

Answer 1

I’ve haven’t done this myself but this article should help, and yes, you can carry on using XDocument.

From the article:

The second improvement is LINQ to XML’s ability to combine the document approach the XmlReader approach. Using the static method XNode.ReadFrom, which takes an XmlReader and will return a XNode object of the reader’s current position, we can create XNode elements one by one, and work on them as needed. You still aren’t loading the entire document into memory but you get the ease of use of working with a document.

In the article the author is talking about reading from the document, whereas you’re talking about writing. However, I think the key here is the XNode class, which also has a WriteTo method (huzzah!).