Question

I have the following method (below), as you can see it serializes an object to an XML file. The main problem I am having is I want to get the function to overwrite a file if it exists.
I know I could delete the file first if it does exist, but this would also mean that I might induce some error drag into my application. So I want it an all or nothing, overwrite method…

Here is the function, any ideas on how this can be accomplished?

/// <summary>
    /// Serializes an object to an xml file.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="obj">
    /// The object to serialize.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="type">
    /// The class type of the object being passed.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="fileName">
    /// The filename where the object should be saved to.
    /// </param>
    /// <param name="xsltPath">
    /// Pass a null if not required.
    /// </param>
    public static void SerializeToXmlFile(object obj, Type type, string fileName, string xsltPath )
    {
        var ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
        ns.Add(String.Empty, String.Empty);
        var serializer = new XmlSerializer(type);

        var settings = new XmlWriterSettings {Indent = true, IndentChars = "\t"};


        using (var w = XmlWriter.Create(fileName,settings))
        {

            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(xsltPath))
            {
                w.WriteProcessingInstruction("xml-stylesheet", "type=\"text/xsl\" href=\"" + xsltPath + "\"");

            }
            serializer.Serialize(w, obj, ns);
        }
    }

Answer 1

Use the overloaded version of the XmlWriter.Create that takes a Stream instead of a string, and use File.Create to create/overwrite the file:

using (var w = XmlWriter.Create(File.Create(fileName), settings))
...