Working with XML Processing Instructions in C#
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Published: 09 Sep 2004
Unedited - Community Contributed
Abstract
Recently I had to work with XML Processing Instructions; adding them to an XML Document or editing the processing instructions value. This will demonstrate how to do this using C#.
by Michelle Beall
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Background

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Firstly, what is an XML processing instruction? A processing instruction (PI) is a tag that encodes specific application information which begins with <? and ends with ?>.  An XML document can contain multiple processing instructions for different applications.  There are two parts to a processing instruction, a target and a value.  The target acts like a name and the value is the string after the target.  The value can consist of multiple tokens.

<?target value?>

What about the XML declaration, is it a processing instruction?  Yes, it is a special processing instruction.  It is a special kind of processing instruction that has a defined format for its value.  Another common example of a processing instruction is for adding stylesheets.  The stylesheet processing instruction also has a defined format for its value, which contains several pseudo-attributes.  Pseudo because they act like a normal element's attributes.

<?xml-stylesheet href="standardstyle.css" title="Standard Stylesheet" type="text/css"?>

Otherwise the format of a processing instruction's value is open.  Processing instructions are not part of the document's data, rather are more like comments and are overlooked by the XML parser which simply passes them on to the client application.

Microsoft's application InfoPath uses processing instructions to indicate that the XML file should be viewed within the InfoPath client. 

<?mso-application progid="InfoPath.Document"?>

A second processing instruction, mso-infoPathSolution, tells InfoPath where the location of the solution template is located.  The template contains information on the transformation for the layout, any and all views as well as the expected schema of the XML file and any data sources.

So how do we work with an XML document's processing instructions from within a C# application?


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User Comments

Title: re:   
Name: spam filter
Date: 2005-02-17 6:47:20 AM
Comment:
can you help me with an example in asp.net with c# to extract data from XML file and to display into table?
Thank you in advance.
Title: RE: Working with XML Processing Instructions in C#   
Name: Michelle
Date: 2004-11-21 11:42:16 AM
Comment:
Thanks for the great question!

Microsoft InfoPath uses processing instructions to tie the xml data generated by filling out a form to a specific InfoPath template (xsn) as well as to indicate that the xml should be rendered using the InfoPath Application. There are several cases where manipulating the PI would be useful, such as removing those PIs that bind the xml to InfoPath or to add your own PIs to bind to your own xml rendering solution. Another example where I've used PIs is to add information to an XML document without having to incorporate it into the data schema, such as default save location URL for saving the file to an alternative library in Sharepoint. So you can see there are lots of applications of using and manipulating PIs.
Title: Working with XML Processing Instructions in C#   
Name: Pankaja Shankar
Date: 2004-11-20 3:17:38 PM
Comment:
I was wondering when will this be of use. Could you please illustrate and explain a bit more in your response to my comment?

Thanks.






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