3

I have an app that gets a daily feed from an external rss feed (this data is in xml). I have a search form that allows users to search my database, however, i would like to use the same searchstring that users enter on my site to search this rss feed, then extract only whats relevant, and display that on my website.

I have been looking at reading xml file using linq using this code:

XElement xelement = XElement.Load("..\\..\\Employees.xml");
IEnumerable<XElement> employees = xelement.Elements();
Console.WriteLine("List of all Employee Names along with their ID:");
foreach (var employee in employees)
{
    Console.WriteLine("{0} has Employee ID {1}",
        employee.Element("Name").Value,
        employee.Element("EmpId").Value);
}

the problem i have with this is, where in the code do i use a url instead of a file name:

XElement xelement = XElement.Load("..\\..\\Employees.xml");

should be:

XElement xelement = XElement.Load("http://www.test.com/file.xml");

I am thinking maybe i should store the content into an array or something, and check to make sure if the searchString is in it?

I am not sure how to proceed and whats best to use, maybe i shouldn't even use linq??

so using the responses below here is what i have done:

public void myXMLTest()
        {
            WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://www.test.com/file.xml");
            WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
            Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();

            XElement xelement = XElement.Load(dataStream); 
            IEnumerable<XElement> employees = xelement.Elements();


            MessageBox.Show("List of all Employee Names along with their ID:");

            foreach (var employee in employees)
            {
                MessageBox.Show(employee.Name.ToString()); 
                /* the above message box gives me this:
                {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}id
                {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}name
                {http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom}title
                etc
                */
                MessageBox.Show(employee.Element("name").Value);//this gives me error
            }
        }
NULL
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  • In my answer to this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10412494/timeout-error-when-loading-xml-from-url/10412665#10412665 I give a generic method for returning an XmlDocument from a URL. It would require minimal work to convert to returning an XDocument. – dash Sep 26 '13 at 14:45
  • If this is a standard RSS format (RSS or Atom), you will need to handle the namespaces in your LINQ statements as well. – Tim Sep 26 '13 at 14:50
  • please see my new edits based on your comments – NULL Sep 26 '13 at 15:45
  • @Menew - What is the error you get? Can you post the XML you receive back from the URL, or a portion of it? – Tim Sep 28 '13 at 08:31

1 Answers1

5

You're going to have to do a bit more work than just providing it a URL.

Instead, you're going to need to get the XML file using the WebRequest class. Provided the request is successful, you can then turn around use that as your argument to XElement.Load.

Example (illustrative only, for the love of Pete add some error handling):

WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create("http://www.test.com/file.xml");
WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
Stream dataStream = response.GetResponseStream();
XElement doc = Xelement.Load(dataStream);
villecoder
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