Question

I’m working on a legacy application that uses a static class to store settings that are read from a custom XML file.
However, as part of a slight upgrade to the module, the customer would like to see, at runtime, which fields are missing.
Consider the following Settings.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<appSettings>
    <configuration>
        <API>
            <log>
                <type>09</type>
                <location>C:\Test\Test.log</filename>
            </log>
        </API>
    </configuration>
</appSettings>  

The settings are currently read into the static class using an XMLReader (seen below):

        using (XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader("Settings.xml"))
        {
            xmlReader.ReadToFollowing("API");
            xmlReader.ReadToFollowing("log");
            xmlReader.ReadToFollowing("type");
            this.logtype = xmlReader.ReadElementContentAsString(); 
        //snip...
        }

This same code is used to read each and every setting. There has to be a better way. Is there any way that I can read the XML values into each corresponding property, and generate an error if it’s null?
I’m attempting to design the static Settings class as such:

public static class Settings
    {
        private static string logtype

        public static string LogType
        {
            get
            { return logtype; }

            set
            { logtype = value; }
        }
    }

And then use something like the following to “grab” the values:

public static void initSettings()
        {
            appSettings.LogType = read the configuration\API\log\type field from xml;
        }

I’m pretty sure that I’d just check for the null character in the property constructor, but how would I do the ‘read the configuration\API\log\type field from xml’ part of the initSettings method?

Answer 1

You could use XMLDocument / XPath. Something like this:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.Load("Settings.xml");
appSettings.LogType = doc.SelectSingleNode("/appSettings/configuration/API/log/type").InnerText;

Actually I would prefer to use Serialization. Maybe the standard serialization a YAXLib, which provides some useful error handling.

Edit: For me it’s working with InnerText.