How to export a DataTable to Xml with ALL columns as attributes?

Question

Question: I\'m exporting a System.Data.DataTable to XML. So far it works fine. But I want to have all the data in attributes, which works fine as well. But my problem now, i

Answer 1

It's a bit old thread but, maybe it can help someone:
If you are not writing big xml files frequently (it's ok for exporting settings or something similar) you can use function below, otherwise it's better to use cutom xml schema.

private static void addEmptyElementsToXML(DataSet dataSet)
{
    foreach (DataTable dataTable in dataSet.Tables)
    {
        foreach (DataRow dataRow in dataTable.Rows)
        {
            for (int j = 0; j < dataRow.ItemArray.Length; j++)
            {
                if (dataRow.ItemArray[j] == DBNull.Value)
                    dataRow.SetField(j, string.Empty);
            }
        }
    }
}

Usage:

using(DataTable dTable = ..something..)
using(DataSet dS = new DataSet())
using(XmlTextWriter xmlStream = new XmlTextWriter("FILENAME.XML", Encoding.UTF8))
{
    //set xml to be formatted so it can be easily red by human
    xmlStream.Formatting = Formatting.Indented;
    xmlStream.Indentation = 4;

    //add table to dataset
    dS.Tables.Add(dTable);

    //call the mentioned function so it will set all DBNull values in dataset
    //to string.Empty
    addEmptyElementsToXML(dS);

    //write xml to file
    xmlStream.WriteStartDocument();
    dS.WriteXml(xmlStream);
}