ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

9.5. Synchronizing a DataSet and an XML Document

Problem

You need to simultaneously work with both a DataSet and its XML representation, keeping them automatically synchronized with any changes made.

Solution

Use a DataSet and XmlDataDocument together as demonstrated in the three approaches.

The solution loads a DataSet with a subset of the Production.Product and Production.Location tables in the AdventureWorks database and creates a data relation between them on the ProductID column. The solution demonstrates three methods to create a synchronized DataSet and XML document, as described in the discussion section. DataSet and XML document metrics are output throughout to show the effect of the various aspects of the synchronization for each of the three approaches.

The C# code in Program.cs in the project file SynchronizeDataWithXmlDocument is shown in Example 9-7.

Example 9-7. File: Program.cs for SynchronizeDataWithXmlDocument solution

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Xml;

namespace SynchronizeDataSetWithXmlDocument
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            string xmlFileName = @"..\..\..\ProductInventory.xml";

            DataSet ds;
            XmlDataDocument xd;

            Console.WriteLine("---Fill DataSet with schema and data; " +
                "Get XmlDataDocument based on DataSet---");
            ds = null;
            xd = null;
            // Fill the DataSet with schema and data ds = FillDataSet(true); OutputInfo(ds, xd); // Synchronize the XmlDataDocument to the DataSet xd = new XmlDataDocument(ds); OutputInfo(ds, ...