Question

In the app I’m currently working with the user is allowed to store a lot of settings divided in different categories in XML files.

The XML could look like

<settings>
    <setting2>
        <setting3>
            <value1>foo</value1>
            <value2>bar</value2>
        </setting3>
        <value3>A list of strings</value3>
    </setting2>
    <setting4>
        <value4>An integer</value4>
    </setting4>
</settings>

The thing I’m confused about is how to best structure the class containing this information, I started out by doing a recursive class containing a list of categories and values, and now I remembered that there is a tree collection class in Java and something like that would be the best solution?
What do you guys recommend?

Answer 1

Why not just load the entire XML file into an XPathDocument? It’s easy to use and quite speedy.

You could access individual settings like so:

XPathDocument xmldoc = new XPathDocument(settingsFile);
XPathNavigator nav = xmldoc.CreateNavigator();

foreach (XPathNavigator node in nav.Select("settings/setting2/setting3"))
{
   ...
}