what's the easiest way to generate xml in c++?

Question

I\'ve used boost serialization but this doesn\'t appear to allow me to generate xml that conforms to a particular schema -- it seems it\'s purpose was to just to persist a c

Answer 1

Boost.PropertyTree is a nice and straightforward way of generating XML - especially if you are already using Boost.

The following is a complete example program:

#include 
#include 

using boost::property_tree::ptree;
using boost::property_tree::write_xml;
using boost::property_tree::xml_writer_settings;

int wmain(int argc, wchar_t* argv[]) {
    char* titles[] = {"And Then There Were None", "Android Games", "The Lord of the Rings"};

    ptree tree;
    tree.add("library..version", "1.0");
    for (int i = 0; i < 3; i++) {
        ptree& book = tree.add("library.books.book", "");
        book.add("title", titles[i]);
        book.add(".id", i);
        book.add("pageCount", (i+1) * 234);
    }

    // Note that starting with Boost 1.56, the template argument must be std::string
    // instead of char
    write_xml("C:\\Users\\Daniel\\Desktop\\test.xml", tree,
        std::locale(),
        xml_writer_settings(' ', 4));

    return 0;
}

The resulting XML looks like this:

    
        
            
            234
        
        
            
            468
        
        
            
            702
        
    

One thing that's particularly nice are the dot-separated paths that allow you to implicitly create all the nodes along the way. The documentation is rather meager, but together with ptree.hpp should give you an idea of how it works.