Question

I’m creating a Windows application which reads XML file from given server. This application has installed in about 30 clients. Maybe they will call this function at the same time.

My question:

Will any problem occur if several user call this method at same time?

public string GetXmlInnerText()
{  
    FtpWebRequest tmpReq = null;
    System.Net.WebResponse tmpRes = null;
    try
    {
        if (Settings.Default.Internal)
            tmpReq = (FtpWebRequest)FtpWebRequest.Create("ftp://<IPhere>/XMLData.xml");
        else
            tmpReq = (FtpWebRequest)FtpWebRequest.Create("ftp://<IPhere>/XMLData.xml");

        tmpReq.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("userName", "password");
        tmpReq.KeepAlive = false;
        tmpRes = tmpReq.GetResponse();

    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        //------
    }


    string fileContents = null;
    using (System.IO.Stream tmpStream = tmpRes.GetResponseStream())
    {
        using (System.IO.TextReader tmpReader = new System.IO.StreamReader(tmpStream))
        {
            fileContents = tmpReader.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }
    return fileContents;
}

thanks

Answer 1

One problem – you’re not disposing of the WebResponse. It implements IDisposable, so you should use a using statement. With your current structuring, that’s not terribly easy to do – you should consider restructuring your try/catch blocks appropriately.

Further, StreamReader uses UTF-8 by default – if your XML documents aren’t encoded in UTF-8, you could have problems. If it’s an XML document, why not load it via XmlReader.Create(Stream) or something similar? That will handle the encoding for you.