Styjun

I have a dataset, "AllEventData", and in that dataset is (for the moment) only one table called buttonData. It has 3 columns - an autoincrementing number primary key, a name (typeof(string)), and a rectangle. The third column is specifically typeof(Rectangle). I display it all with a datatablepanel.

I did the AllEventData.WriteXML method to write the file with no special parameters, and that seems to work fine - I get a file that looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<AllEventData>
 <ButtonData>
 <ID>1</ID>
 <Button_x0020_Name>sdfh</Button_x0020_Name>
 <Button_x005F_x0020_Location xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
 <Location>
 <X>480</X>
 <Y>186</Y>
 </Location>
 <Size>
 <Width>95</Width>
 <Height>67</Height>
 </Size>
 <X>480</X>
 <Y>186</Y>
 <Width>95</Width>
 <Height>67</Height>
 </Button_x005F_x0020_Location>
 </ButtonData>
</AllEventData>

But when I do a AllEventData.ReadXML of the same file, it only fills the datatablepanel with the button names, not the rectangle locations.

I tried doing a write of the schema separately:

 using (SaveFileDialog saveFileDialog1 = new SaveFileDialog())
 *.xml";
 saveFileDialog1.Title = "Save File";
 if (saveFileDialog1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
 
 AllEventData.WriteXml(saveFileDialog1.FileName);
 string xsdFileName = saveFileDialog1.FileName.Substring(0, saveFileDialog1.FileName.Length - 3) + "xsd";
 AllEventData.WriteXmlSchema(xsdFileName);
 
 

and the same basic thing in reverse to read it with a schema:

 using (OpenFileDialog openFileDialog1 = new OpenFileDialog())
 *.xml";
 openFileDialog1.Title = "Open File";
 if (openFileDialog1.ShowDialog() == DialogResult.OK)
 
 AllEventData.Clear();
 string xsdFileName = openFileDialog1.FileName.Substring(0, openFileDialog1.FileName.Length - 3) + "xsd";
 AllEventData.ReadXmlSchema(xsdFileName);
 AllEventData.ReadXml(openFileDialog1.FileName);

 
 

But still not getting there.

Why isn't ReadXML working to read what WriteXML wrote?

As Olivier notes in the comments, rectangles too complex for XML even though it can break them down and look like it's going to work just fine. There's no way it'll ever read it, even with schema, the same way it writes it. So the "trick" to reading it properly is to either:

1. Write a code block to parse the XML as noted in the "how to parse xml" link


2. Serialize and deserialize the rectangle as noted in the "how to serialize/deserialize" link


3. Store the data completely differently in the table in the first place.

The latter was what I ultimately chose to do. It's really easy for me to extract the X, Y, Width, and Height from the rectangle and store those in individual columns of the table (which also let me store another piece of data I was trying to figure out how to add in), and then turn them back into rectangles later when I need them, and it makes editing the rectangles easier for the user to figure out, too.

Doing that, I'm able to simply AllEventData.WriteXML and AllEventData.ReadXML with no further code.