XML Binding in WPF with Sample RSS reader

XAML being getting more and more popular is also introduced for Mobile applications. Recently while I was exploring on the internet, I found that the recent version of Windows 7 mobile interfaces uses Silverlight to deal with the interface. 




Just after the initial thought, I thought to try it for just to increase my knowledge base. Hence, I installed it to my machine and tried. It works great and I am really excited to see that Silverlight is again introduced with this mobile.

Inspite of having XNA for truely 3D style of application building, I tried simple programs to use this edition of silverlight and it worked greatly. It works in the most simplest way as with normal silverlight applications.

While doing the simple application, I found the XML binding within WPF application as an interesting part of XAML bindings. In this post, I will discuss how you can implement binding of a property with an XMLDataSource.

XML is very important part for any application. While you create your application, we generally need to write lot of code to handle XML data stream. May be from your local machine, or using WebClient to download data from your web server. WPF has in built support for XML bindings. Lets discuss XML bindings in detail using sample code.

Say you have an XML like this :

<data>
  <packet id="names">
    <Names description="All are selected">
      <nametype id="1" firstname="raja" lastname="das">58</nametype>
      <nametype id="2" firstname="anjan" lastname="chowdhuri">67</nametype>
      <nametype id="3" firstname="charu" lastname="singh">38</nametype>
      <nametype id="4" firstname="manju" lastname="sen">69</nametype>
      <nametype id="5" firstname="sanju" lastname="sharma">89</nametype>
      <nametype id="6" firstname="sanjana" lastname="mathur">77</nametype>
    </Names>
  </packet>
</data>

Now let us create a code that binds each elements of the above xml.

<Window.Resources>
        <XmlDataProvider Source="myxmldata.xml" x:Key="xdata" XPath="/data/packet/Names"></XmlDataProvider>
    </Window.Resources>



So first of all we have added a new window, and added the XmlDataSource as resource. Please note that we can also use x:Data to define the XmlDataSource Xml directly within the file itself like :

<XmlDataProvider x:Key="xdata" XPath="/data/packet/Names">

            <x:XData>

                <data xmlns="">

                    <packet id="names">

                        <Names description="All are selected">

                            <nametype id="1" firstname="raja" lastname="das">58</nametype>

                            <nametype id="2" firstname="anjan" lastname="chowdhuri">67</nametype>

                            <nametype id="3" firstname="charu" lastname="singh">38</nametype>

                            <nametype id="4" firstname="manju" lastname="sen">69</nametype>

                            <nametype id="5" firstname="sanju" lastname="sharma">89</nametype>

                            <nametype id="6" firstname="sanjana" lastname="mathur">77</nametype>

                        </Names>

                    </packet>

                </data>

            </x:XData>

        </XmlDataProvider>

Please note that I have added the xmlns in data tag intentionally, as if you dont the xml will inherit from the base Namespace.

The XPath within the XmlDataProvider induces the read of XML from that path. So for our XML the data will be read after /data/packet/names.

READ MORE >>
http://www.abhisheksur.com/2010/07/xml-binding-in-wpf-with-sample-rss.html