Question

I have written a stored procedure that returns my rows as XML with the following syntax:

FOR XML PATH ('customer'), ROOT ('customers'), TYPE

Running the query from the stored procedure in SSMS produces output that when clicked, looks just fine.

However, calling that stored procedure from C# gives me XML that I assume has double quotes that are escaped, thus:

<customers><customer id=\"123456\" firstName=\"ABE\" lastName=\"LINCOLN\" dob=\"02/12/1809\">

My C# code looks like this:

public string GetCustomerXML()
{
     string xml = string.Empty;
     XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();

     using (SqlConnection myConnection = new SqlConnection(connectionString))
     {
          myConnection.Open();

          using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("GetData_CreateXML", myConnection))
          {
               cmd.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure;

               using (XmlReader reader = cmd.ExecuteXmlReader())
               {
                   while (reader.Read())
                   {
                       xmlDoc.Load(reader);
                       xml = xmlDoc.OuterXml.ToString();
                   }
               }
           }
     }

     return xml;
}

What am I getting wrong here?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

What am I getting wrong here?

I suspect you’re just examining the string in the debugger, which generally escapes the string as if you wanted to write it as a C# string literal.

Try logging the string (e.g. something as simple as writing it to the console) and I suspect you’ll find those backslashes simply don’t exist.