Question

I have developed a website in asp.net mvc that reads from a xml-file to display some data. This file is regularly updated by my backend process that builds this xml-file and finally uploads it to my webhost via ftp.

This have been working fine, but in the last week or so I have gotten into a problem. I get the asp.net exception “file is being used by another process”. I have no clue what this can be, and I find it very odd. I haven’t even changed anything in my code for some months now.

Below you will find a typical method that I use for serializing my xml-file:

    public static IEnumerable<FStreamObject> GetStreams()
    {

        using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppPath+"/ff.xml", FileMode.Open))
        {
            XmlReader ffXML = XmlReader.Create(fs);

            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(FXmlModel));

            var sList = (FXmlModel)ser.Deserialize(ffXML);

            fs.Close();

            return sList.FSObjectList.OrderByDescending(x => x.Cash);
        }

    }

Answer 1

I guess the other process which updates the content of your file still has a lock on this file. So you may need to fix the code of that to make sure you are releasing any locks /connection to this file once you are done with the file operations.