Question

I have an XmlNodeList that contains packets (item) from the root of the XML example below. I want to sort the XmlNodeList based on the node’s key attribute value.
The sorting has to be very efficient, every millisecond counts.

Do you have any idea?

<root>
    <item key="1000000020">
        Content 20
    </item>
    <item key="1000000001">
        Content 1
    </item>
    ...
    <item key="1043245231">
        Content n
    </item>
</root>

Edit:
I already have an XmlNodeList constructed from the items. I do not have access to the XmlDocument anymore, only the list of items.

Answer 1

I solved the problem in a very non-elegant way:

• I iterated my XmlNodeList
• During iteration I extracted the timestamps
• After extracting a timestamp I added the timestamp-XmlElement to a SortedDictionary
• Converted the SortedDictionary to list (sortedKeys = sortedByDateDisctionary.Keys.ToList();)
• If the nodes need to be sorted Descending then sortedKeys.Reverse();
• Then the nodes can be accessed by the sorted keys