Question

I’ve almost written a “webstore” asp.net mvc 3 app and I want to populate my database with some items from one web store. They provide information about items for their partners in an xml files. I’ve downloaded one but it’s of 150 MB, so I can’t just open it and look through the content.

The information in the file also will not fully match my model, so I somehow need to “merge” things. How could I do it? Maybe you know some great tutorial on how to download xml and deserialize it?

Answer 1

LINQ to XML is an amazing provider. It will allow you to query your XML document in the form of XElements.

using System.Xml.Linq;

If you can download the xml in code via whatever uri they provide, you can load it into memory via System.IO.File and manipulate it with LINQ to XML.

string xml = new WebClient().DownloadString(url);

XDocument doc = XDocument.Parse(xml);

//item being the name of the node
var itemDescendent = doc.Descendants("item"); 

var query = from item in itemDescendent
            select new
            {
               itemId = item.Attribute("id"),
               itemName = item.Attribute("Name")
            };

foreach (item in query)
{
   //dostuff
}

This would select attributes from nodes, you’d need a slightly different method to get nodes within nodes.