Microsoft® Visual Basic® .NET Programmer's Cookbook

Load an XML Document into a Class

Problem

You want to use an XML document to persist information, but interact with the data using a custom object in your code.

Solution

Use the XmlDocument or XmlTextReader class to read XML data, and transfer it into an object. Use XmlDocument or XmlTextWriter class to persist the XML data.

Discussion

It’s common to want to work with full-fledged objects in your code and use XML only as a file format for persisting data. To support this design, you can create a class with Save and Load methods. The Save method commits the current data in the object to an XML format, whereas the Load method reads the XML document and uses its data to populate the object.

For example, the data in the orders.xml would require three classes ...