How to return XML in ASP.NET?

Question

I have encountered many half-solutions to the task of returning XML in ASP.NET. I don\'t want to blindly copy & paste some code that happens to work most of the time, th

Answer 1

Seems like at least 10 questions rolled into one here, a couple points.

Response.Clear - it really depends on what else is going on in the app - if you have httpmodules early in the pipeline that might be writing stuff you don't want - then clear it. Test it and find out. Fiddler or Wireshark useful for this.

Content Type to text/xml - yup - good idea - read up on HTTP spec as to why this is important. IMO anyone doing web work should have read the 1.0 and 1.1 spec at least once.

Encoding - how is your xml encoded - if it is utf-8, then say so, if not, say something else appropriate, just make sure they all match.

Page - personally, would use ashx or httpmodule, if you are using page, and want it a bit faster, get rid of autoeventwireup and bind the event handlers manually.

Would probably be a bit of a waste of memory to dump the xml into a string first, but it depends a lot on the size of the xml as to whether you would ever notice.

As others have suggested, saving the xml to the output stream probably the fastest, I would normally do that, but if you aren't sure, test it, don't rely on what you read on the interweb. Don't just believe anything I say.

For another approach, if the xml doesn't change that much, you could just write it to the disk and serve the file directly, which would likely be quite performant, but like everything in programming, it depends...