Question

I have xml documents in a database field. The xml documents have no whitespace between the elements (no line feeds, no indenting).

I’d like to output them to the browser, formatted nicely. I would simply like linefeeds in there with some indenting. Is there an easy, preferably built-in way to do this?

I am using ASP.NET 3.5 and C#. This is what I have so far, which is outputting the document all in one line:

I’m about 99.9977% sure I am using the XmlWriter incorrectly. What I am accomplishing now can be done by writing directly to the response. But am I on the right track at least? 🙂

int id = Convert.ToInt32(Request.QueryString["id"]);
var auditLog = webController.DB.Manager.AuditLog.GetByKey(id);

var xmlWriterSettings = new XmlWriterSettings();
xmlWriterSettings.Indent = true;
xmlWriterSettings.OmitXmlDeclaration = true;

var xmlWriter = XmlWriter.Create(Response.OutputStream, xmlWriterSettings);
if (xmlWriter != null)
{
    Response.Write("<pre>");
    // ObjectChanges is a string property that contains an XML document
    xmlWriter.WriteRaw(Server.HtmlEncode(auditLog.ObjectChanges));
    xmlWriter.Flush();
    Response.Write("</pre>");
}

This is the working code, based on dtb’s answer:

int id = Convert.ToInt32(Request.QueryString["id"]);
var auditLog = webController.DB.Manager.AuditLog.GetByKey(id);

var xml = XDocument.Parse(auditLog.ObjectChanges, LoadOptions.None);
Response.Write("<pre>" + Server.HtmlEncode(xml.ToString(SaveOptions.None)) + "</pre>");

Thank you for helping me!

Answer 1

WriteRaw just writes the input unchanged to the underlying stream.

if you want to use built-in formatting, you need first to parse the XML and then convert it back to a string.

The simplest solution is possibly to use XLinq:

var xml = XDocument.Parse(auditLog.ObjectChanges);

Response.Write(Server.HtmlEncode(xml.ToString(SaveOptions.None)));

(This assumes auditLog.ObjectChanges is a string that represents well-formed XML.)

If you need more control over the formatting (indentation, line-breaks) save the XDocument to a MemoryStream-backed XmlWriter, decode the MemoryStream back to a string, and write the string HtmlEncoded.