Error while deserializing XML from SQL Server

Question

I have an application which serializes and deserializes .NET objects to XML. While deserializing I am getting the following error:

"There is an error in XML Document(1,2) Name cannot begin with the '.' character, hexadecimal value 0x00. Line 1, position 2. "

The code snippet that does the deserializing is:

string xmlEntity = _loanReader["LoanEntity"].ToString();
XmlSerializer xs2 = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Model.Loan));
MemoryStream memoryStream2 = new MemoryStream(StringFunction.StringToUTF16ByteArray(xmlEntity));
XmlTextWriter xmlTextWriter2 = new XmlTextWriter(memoryStream2, Encoding.Unicode);
_loan = (Model.Loan)xs2.Deserialize(memoryStream2);

I am using a datareader to get the resultset from the stored procedure. LoanEntity is an XML type field in the loan table.

A snippet of the XML stored in the field:

<Loan xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
<GUID>d2cc9dc3-45b0-44bd-b9d2-6ef5e7ddb54c</GUID><LoanNumber>DEV999999</LoanNumber>
....

I have spent countless hours trying to figure out what the error means but to no avail. Any help will be appreciated.

to format code or XML, select it in the editor and press Control-K. Otherwise, XML won't show up, and code will look horrible. — John Saunders, Jul 06 '10 at 23:26

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 06 '10 at 23:33

1

This is usually an issue with encoding. I see you have the string bring converted to a UTF16 byte array. Have you checked that is should not be UTF8 instead? I would give that a go and see what comes of it. Basically the deserializer might be looking for a different encoding.

answered Jul 06 '10 at 23:33

Tim C

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Hi Tim, Initially I was using UTF-8 encoding by default but had to switch to Unicode/UTF-16 because I was getting the error: "XML parsing: line 1, character 38, unable to switch the encoding" Switching to Unicode allowed me to write the serialized objects to the SQL server database. – fjxx Jul 07 '10 at 14:33

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 06 '10 at 23:37

You must be working from an old example, and a bad one. Try this:

string xmlEntity = _loanReader["LoanEntity"].ToString();
XmlSerializer xs2 = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Model.Loan));
using (MemoryStream memoryStream2 = new MemoryStream(StringFunction.StringToUTF16ByteArray(xmlEntity)))
{
    XmlWriterSettings settings = new XmlWriterSettings { Encoding = Encoding.Unicode};
    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(memoryStream2, settings))
    {
        _loan = (Model.Loan)xs2.Deserialize(memoryStream2);
    }
}

Thanks John - I tried this and now I am getting the error: "There is an error in XML document (1, 1)." "Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1." — fjxx, Jul 07 '10 at 14:11

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

0

I believe I may have found a solution to this. Since SQL Server XML field expects Unicode type encoding of values, I tried using a StringReader instead of a MemoryStream and things work well so far. The following StackOverFlow post helped as well:

Using StringWriter for XML Serialization

edited May 23 '17 at 11:48

Community

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1

answered Jul 07 '10 at 15:32

fjxx

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Error while deserializing XML from SQL Server

3 Answers3