Question

I have just written some code, which as i was writing i thought, this is going to be a nice generic method for searching for a particular node. When i finished i actually realised it was a mess 😀

public String sqlReading(String fileName, String path, String nodeId )
{
    XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
    doc.Load(fileName);

    XmlNodeList names = doc.SelectNodes(path);
    foreach (XmlNode xmlDocSearchTerm in names)
    {
        //if the attribute of the node i start at is the same as where i am now
        if (xmlDocSearchTerm.Attributes.Item(0).Value.ToString().Equals(nodeId))
        {
            //get a list of all of its child nodes
            XmlNodeList childNodes = xmlDocSearchTerm.ChildNodes;

            foreach (XmlNode node in childNodes)
            {
                //if there is a node in here called gui display, go inside
                if (node.Name.Equals("GUIDisplay"))
                {
                    XmlNodeList list = node.ChildNodes;
                    //find the sqlsearchstring tag inside of here
                    foreach (XmlNode finalNode in list)
                    {
                        if (finalNode.Name.Equals("sqlSearchString"))
                        {
                            return node.InnerText;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
    return "";
}

What i intended to do was based on a path – i would start and check to see if the element had the id i was looking for, if it did then i wanted to get inside there and not stop going until i got to the sqlsearchstring tag which was buried two levels deeper. I have managed that, but the issue here is that now i seem to have almost hardcoded a path to the tag opposed to looping there. How could i change my code to stop me from doing this?

Its from the second foreach where its going wrong imo.

Thanks

Answer 1

Haven’t tested it but I believe something like this would work, by using a xpath. However I’m not sure the name of the attribute, or is it always the first attribute?

public String sqlReading(String fileName, String path, String nodeId)
{
    XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
    doc.Load(fileName);

    XmlNode foundNode = doc.SelectNodes(path).SelectSingleNode("*[@id='" + nodeId + "']/GUIDisplay/sqlSearchString");
    if (foundNode != null)
        return foundNode.InnerText;
    return string.Empty;

}