Question XML and Datagridview

[timh]

Hello,

I am struggling with reading the contents of an XML file into a DataGridView control in Visual Basic (using Visual Studio 2005). Extensive searching on the internet and scouring through a couple of books on VB and XML have failed to find a result. The answer is probably out there, but I haven't found it yet!

The XML document contains a series of "waypoint" elements, as follows (omitting the headers)...

<waypoint>
	<name id="GCVEAF"><![CDATA[Robin's Slippery Slope by robandtiina]]></name>
	<coord lat="51.835617" lon="-2.237067"/>
	<type>Geocache</type>
	<link text="Cache Details">http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCVEAF</link>
</waypoint>
<waypoint>
	<name id="GC18XA3"><![CDATA[Sidetracked - Kidsgrove by The Bignall Boppers]]></name>
	<coord lat="53.0866" lon="-2.243883"/>
	<type>Geocache</type>
	<link text="Cache Details">http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GC18XA3</link>
</waypoint>

I can read the XML into a dataset, but because of the attributes, I end up with four different tables, each containing just one element. The four tables are:

waypoint, name, coord and link

waypoint has one column: "type"
name has two columns: "id" & "name_Text"
coord has two columns: "lat" & "lon"
link has two columns: "text" & "link_Text"

I can then display any one of these four tables in a datagridview, but obviously what I want is to be able to view the whole "waypoint" element in one row. If it wasn't for the presence of attributes, it would be a doddle, because there would only be one table, but unfortunately the XML format for the data is established and is what I have to work with. (I'm trying to create my own app for managing "Geocache" data, "Geocaching" being a little hobby of mine.)

I feel confident that there must be a straightforward solution, but despite spending hours poring over the Visual Studio documentation and searching the web, I haven't worked it out. I should perhaps add that I want to be able to write back to the file in the same "standard" format, e.g. if I add a new waypoint or edit an existing one.

Hopefully someone will have come across this scenario before, or be able to guide me in the right direction.

Many thanks,

Tim

 

[timh]

OK. More reading suggested I was going about things the wrong way.

For anyone who may be interested, I resolved the problem by doing an XLS transform, reformatting the original XML to a format that reads straight into the datagridview control.

When I save the file again, I will obviously have to remember to apply a transform back to the original format.

It's a steep learning curve, but actually, XSLT seems pretty straightforward.

Thanks for the interest.