Question

I need to walk a folder tree in C# and somehow record what I find, then pass it as a string to another device on my network, where I will display it graphically.

Walking the folder tree is simple with recursion, as is passing the string along.

However I would like the format of the string to be as portable as possible, so I thought of XML. I’m guessing I can somehow serialise the XML to a string.

I’m very new to XML, so I’m unsure how best to proceed. I’m thinking the format should end up something like this example:

<Tree>
  <Folder Name="Folder1">
    <File Name="File1" />
  </Folder>
</Tree>

Any ideas? Do I use LinqToXML to build the string out of XElement objects like an example I’ve seen, or is that not the best way?

Answer 1

Ok so I went ahead with XElement – turns out it’s as easy as Chuck Savage said 🙂

private void BuildFolderTree(DirectoryInfo parentFolder, XElement parentElement)
{
    // Find all the subfolders under this folder.
    foreach (DirectoryInfo folderInfo in parentFolder.GetDirectories())
    {
        // Add this folder to the doc.
        XElement folderElement = new XElement("Folder", new XAttribute("Name", folderInfo.Name), new XAttribute("Path", folderInfo.FullName));
                parentElement.Add(folderElement);

        // Recurse into this folder.
        BuildFolderTree(folderInfo, folderElement);
    }

    // Process all the files in this folder
    foreach (FileInfo fileInfo in parentFolder.GetFiles("*.*"))
    {
        // Add this file minus its extension.
        parentElement.Add(new XElement(STR_File, new XAttribute("Name", fileInfo.Name), new XAttribute("Path", fileInfo.FullName)));
    }
}

// main code
DriveInfo di = new DriveInfo("M");
XElement usbKeyTreeElement = new XElement("USBKey");
BuildFolderTree(di.RootDirectory, usbKeyTreeElement);
string usbKeyString = usbKeyTreeElement.ToString();

usbKeyString ends up looking something like this:

<USBKey>
  <Folder Name="folder1" Path="M:\folder1" />
  <Folder Name="folder2" Path="M:\folder2">
    <File Name="file1" Path="M:\folder2\file1.txt" />
    <File Name="file2" Path="M:\folder2\file2.txt" />
  </Folder>
</USBKey>