Question

I have a document loaded via XElement.Parse() and I need to apply a XSL transform to it. How would I go about doing this? The only way I know to do is with XPathDocument and I know no way to convert between the two other than XElement->String->StringReader->Stream->XPathDocument.

There must be a better way.

In a related question, what’s the best way to apply XPath to an XElement?

Answer 1

Why not use:

xslt.Transform(xelement.CreateReader(), arglist, someTextWriter);

where xelement is an XElement, xslt is an XslCompiledTransform, arglist is an XsltArgumentList and someTextWriter is a TextWriter ?

In other words, use this instance method: XElement.CreateReader()

Or, you can use:

xslt.Transform(xelement.CreateNavigator(null), someXmlWriter);

Read more about the CreateNavigator() extension method here and here.

The last MSDN link contains a complete code example of an XSLT transformation.

Update: This additional question was asked:

In a related question, what’s the best way to apply XPath to an
XElement?

There are different ways to evaluate an XPath expression over an XNode

Extensions.XPathEvaluate()

or

Extensions.XPathSelectElements()

or

Extensions.XPathSelectElement()