ADO.NET in a Nutshell

XmlDataDocument Object Overview

There is one .NET object that combines an XML view with a DataSet—the XmlDataDocument. The XmlDataDocument inherits from XmlDocument, so it provides the same node-based iteration ability and XPath querying methods. It also provides a single additional property, XmlDataDocument.DataSet, which provides the relational representation of XML data.

When using the XmlDataDocument, you can start with either an XML document or a DataSet. To create an XmlDataDocument based on a DataSet, use the overloaded constructor that accepts a DataSet instance:

XmlDataDocument dataDoc = new XmlDataDocument(ds);

Although you can use the XmlDataDocument.Nodes collection to modify the information in the DataSet, it becomes much more difficult to take into account referential integrity and other database-specific concepts. It can be useful if you want to execute an XPath query or perform an XSLT transform (as shown in the next two examples) or take advantage of some other XML-specific feature. However, it won’t replace the tasks you can accomplish through the DataSet model.

Another useful role for the XmlDataDocument is to provide a DataSet projection on an XML file. To use this approach, you create the XmlDataDocument, load a schema into the DataSet (this is a required step), and then load the XML file using the XmlDataDocument.Load( ) method:

XmlDataDocument dataDoc = new XmlDataDocument();

dataDoc.DataSet.ReadXmlSchema("myschema.xsd");

dataDoc.Load("myfile.xml")

The primary ...