A good way of creating XML files at run time

Question

Please stare at this structure for a second :)

I should create such a thing all at run time. What are the values that we pass in at run time? the string values you see after "#" are passed in so for example AnimalBio, ClinBio, HumanGenome,etc... So I am thinking of declaring some methods like

void AddDeclaration(string str) ;
void AddSubClass(string parent, string child);

such that when I call them they will create those XML-ish tags for me with the values I pass in such as HumnaBio.

These are around 15000 items that I am gonna add... What is the best approach that you would suggest for doing this? Do you think using XMLDocument class is the best way of doing it? or do you think I should go with StringBuilder class and add these as strings, or other ways of doing it?

Thanks.

Answer 1

In .NET, your best bet would be to take advantage of built-in XML serialization. This would let your class look and behave like a class and magically generate (and read from) your XML.

If I couldn't get this to go -- which can be a challenge depending on how the XML is specc'd -- you have a few options. One would be a completely custom Xml serialization using IXmlSerializable. Another is just a roll your own approach using XmlDocument or XmlTextWriter or many other Xml oriented classes in .NET. This approach should be generally avoided.

Answer 2

I think I would just write a simple document template processor that would take exactly the same XML you posted and go through and replace every "#"-denoted placeholder with a value you specify. I think going through a resource-heavy XML object is overkill for what you're doing. I don't know if there's a .NET equivalent to Velocity, but that's the direction I'd take.