I have a custom control which can consume either an xml file or an xml string. They are both exposed as methods and consructor overloads.

MyCustomControl mc =new MyCustomControl("File.xml");
MyCustomControl mc =new MyCustomControl(string xmlString);

This works, however the runtime needs to have write permissions and I don't really want to keep this file anyway, just use it at runtime.

//or the v1.1 XslTransform class-same issue
XslCompiledTransform xslt = new XslCompiledTransform();
xslt.Load(Server.MapPath("StyleSheet.xslt"));
xslt.Transform(Server.MapPath("Source.xml"), Server.MapPath("Result.xml"));

MyCustomControl mc =new MyCustomControl("Result.xml");
...

I would much rather be able to:

MyCustomControl mc =new MyCustomControl(resultXmlString);
...


Any tip would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Rob

Look at the sample code in this thread: http://forums.asp.net/977351/ShowPost.aspx

The Transform() method is overloaded, and the code in that thread shows one way to invoke it and get a XmlReader returned (which can then be used to get the string).

Thank you. That sure worked.

For reference, here is the snippet that did it:

//using a different overload that returns an XmlReader.
XmlReader reader = xslt.Transform(Server.MapPath("Source.xml"), null, 
                                                     new System.Xml.XmlUrlResolver());
reader.MoveToContent();
string resultXmlString = reader.ReadOuterXml();

//now use that string to construct my object
MyCustomControl mc =new MyCustomControl(resultXmlString);

There is still the issue of doing this the Whidbey way. The XslTransform is now obsolete and replaced by the XslCompiledTransform, which, however only has overloads that return void. It is supposed to be much more efficient.

So how do we do this in v2.0?

TIA

Rob

Rob,

Doing it in 2.0 is not any harder, just use any of the overloads of XslCompiledTransform.Transform() that takes an TextWriter as an argument and pass in a StringWriter there instead of the usual StreamWriter. This will get your transformed output to a StringBuilder from which you can read it back (or just use a StreamWriter on top of a MemoryStream).

Would you mind posting a snippet.

TIA

It should look something like this:

XslCompiledTransform xslt = ....;

StringBuilder buffer = new StringBuilder();
StringWriter writer = new StringWriter(buffer);

xslt.Transform(docToTransform, writer);

string result = buffer.ToString();

Thank you