How to write (big) XML to a file in C#?

Question

Folks,

Please, what\'s a good way of writing really big XML documents (upto say 500 MB) in C# .NET 3.5? I\'ve had a bit of search around, and can\'t seem to find anythin

Answer 1

For writing large xml, XmlWriter (directly) is your friend - but it is harder to use. The other option would be to use DOM/object-model approaches and combine them, which is probably doable if you seize control of theXmlWriterSettings and disable the xml marker, and get rid of the namespace declarations...

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Xml;
using System.Xml.Serialization;    
public class Foo {
    [XmlAttribute]
    public int Id { get; set; }
    public string Bar { get; set; }
}
static class Program {
    [STAThread]
    static void Main() {
        using (XmlWriter xw = XmlWriter.Create("out.xml")) {
            xw.WriteStartElement("xml");
            XmlSerializer ser = new XmlSerializer(typeof(Foo));
            XmlSerializerNamespaces ns = new XmlSerializerNamespaces();
            ns.Add("","");
            foreach (Foo foo in FooGenerator()) {
                ser.Serialize(xw, foo, ns);
            }
            xw.WriteEndElement();
        }
    }    
    // streaming approach; only have the smallest amount of program
    // data in memory at once - in this case, only a single `Foo` is
    // ever in use at a time
    static IEnumerable FooGenerator() {
        for (int i = 0; i < 40; i++) {
            yield return new Foo { Id = i, Bar = "Foo " + i };
        }
    }
}