I have a list which is of type ListItem
The ListItem is a custom class I made and it looks like following:
public class ItemList
{
public string ItemID { get; set; }
public int QuantitySold { get; set; }
public string GalleryURL { get; set; }
}
I need to store this List into a folder on my project which looks like this:
/Helpers/CachedResults/FileGoesHere
And so that I can reconstruct that list each time whenever I need it back in code...
I would do this with LINQ to XML.
To use it, you need to add a reference to System.Xml.Linq (in VS, right-click References -> Add Reference -> check System.Xml.Linq).
You don't need to convert the List into an array, but of course, you can, if you want. That's done simply with the list.ToArray() method.
The writing-to-file code would be:
List<ListItem> list = new List<ListItem>();
// (the list is populated)
XDocument xDocument = new XDocument(); // create empty document
XElement root = new XElement("list"); // add root element, XML requires one single root element
xDocument.Add(root); // add root to document
foreach(var listItem in list)
{
var xElement = new XElement("list-item", // <list-item />
new XAttribute("id", listItem.ItemID), // id="id"
new XAttribute("quantity-sold", listItem.QuantitySold), // quantity-sold=5
new XAttribute("gallery-url", listItem.GalleryURL) // gallery-url="foo/bar"
);
root.Add(xElement); // add list-item element to root
}
xDocument.Save("Helpers/CachedResults/File.xml"); // save file
Note that the directory must exist for Save to work!
Then parsing:
List<ListItem> list = new List<ListItem>();
XDocument xDocument = XDocument.Load("Helpers/CachedResults/File.xml"); // load from file
XElement root = xDocument.Element("list"); // get root element
foreach (XElement xElement in root.Elements("list-item")) // traverse through elements inside root element
{
list.Add(new ListItem // add list items
{
ItemID = xElement.Attribute("id").Value, // parse id
QuantitySold = Int32.Parse(xElement.Attribute("quantity-sold").Value), // parse int for QuantitySold
GalleryURL = xElement.Attribute("gallery-url").Value // parse url
});
}
And we're done!
According to your comment:
Now I need to just store it into some kind of file so that I can rebuild it when needed...
you just need the following lines:
File.WriteAllText(path, xml);
xml = File.ReadAllText(path);
where xml is the string you get from serializing / the serialized string that you stored previously and want to deserialize)
(This is besides the actual serialization that I mentioned in my comment: Serialize an object to XML)
EDIT
From the comments, it seems like your trying to parse xml that you receive. Then perhaps you should consider using the classes that were made for that. See Parsing XML using XDocument .
File.ReadAllLines better?