C# XML Parser Help

Anthony

I am looking to develop an application that will either watch a folder for incoming XML documents, or that will run periodically and parse each document that is currently in the inbound folder. I would then like to extract the element values through the xpath, and then insert them into a temporary database. I am having trouble starting because I do not know how to develop this so that it watches a folder or so that it runs through a list of XML documents in a folder. Any help to get me started would be greatly appreciated.

-note: running the application as a scheduled task seems the simplest at this point, but I do not know how to have my application parse XML document 1, and then move onto document 2, etc.

2 Replies

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Jan Montano19y ago
Hi Anthony,

You could also consider running your application as a service. This way, as soon as there's an incoming file, you could quickly process it.

For monitoring a directory for incoming files, you could use File.IO.FileSystemWatcher

public partial class Form1 : Form
{
FileSystemWatcher watcher = new FileSystemWatcher();

public Form1()
{
InitializeComponent();
}

private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
watcher.Path = @"C:\";
watcher.Filter = "*.xml";

watcher.Created += new FileSystemEventHandler(watcher_Created);

watcher.EnableRaisingEvents = true;
}

void watcher_Created(object sender, FileSystemEventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(e.Name);
}
}

the method watcher_Created will be called whenever there's a new xml file in watched directory. From here, you could do the xml parsing.

For parsing xml files, you could find many resources in the internet. Here's one -> XML Parsing in C#. Start with parsing a simple xml file first so you'll get the idea.
Anthony19y ago
After some reading, I now see that I will be best off reading the directory contents into an array, which can then be used there from. If anyone has any examples or links on how to accomplish this, it might makes things a little easier for me.