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Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition
book

Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

by Dan Maharry, Dan Hurwitz, Jesse Liberty
October 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1166 pages
28h 31m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

Using the XmlDataSource Control

XML is pretty much everywhere these days. It’s in our web services, in our AJAX calls, in our RSS feeds, and, for the standards-compliant, in every web page being created at the moment. But it’s important to remember that every XML document is still a flat file that contains a uniformly structured set of hierarchical data which can be accessed with an XmlDataSource as required. And if it’s not in a format you can use, the XmlDataSource lets you apply an XSLT transform to it before the data is retrieved.

Let’s take an example and use an O’Reilly Atom feed for O’Reilly’s new book releases (http://feeds.feedburner.com/oreilly/newbooks) as the source of data for a web page. Add to the chapter’s website a new page called XmlDataSource.aspx, and drag an XmlDataSource control onto it.

Tip

If you do not see the XmlDataSource control, choose View → Visual Aids → ASP.NET Non Visual Controls from the VS2008 menu, or press Ctrl-Shift-N.

Click Configure DataSource in the XmlDataSource’s Common Tasks panel and fill it in as shown in Figure 7-5.

Configuring the XmlDataSource control

Figure 7-5. Configuring the XmlDataSource control

When binding to an XmlDataSource, an ASP.NET control automatically looks for the attributes on an XML element rather than its child elements as you might assume. For example, the Atom feed this example consumes has the following outline:

<feed> <entry> <title> ... </title> <updated> ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596156657Supplemental ContentErrata Page