XmlTextWriter and suppressing empty elements

[T Conti]

Howdy:

I am currently writing a .Net handler to replace an ASP page. The ASP
module used a COM dll to format XML. This dll was pretty robust and
it auto-suppressed empty elements and attributes. A developer in my
group is porting the code into .Net, but I an still believe that there
is a way to do this in the native .Net classes. Is anyone familiar
with a way to do this using XmlTextWriter or another related class?

I found code that will allow me to load the resulting XML into an
XMLDocument and then I could use an XPath expression to remove the
empty elements. This is a potential solution, however the application
I am replacing didn't necessarily format syntatically correct XML. It
creates a bunch of elements with attributes and no value.
i.e. <element1 att1="att1"></element1>
So I need to account for that.

Please let me know what you think and thanks,
Tom

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

T Conti wrote:

I am currently writing a .Net handler to replace an ASP page. The ASP
module used a COM dll to format XML. This dll was pretty robust and
it auto-suppressed empty elements and attributes. A developer in my
group is porting the code into .Net, but I an still believe that there
is a way to do this in the native .Net classes. Is anyone familiar
with a way to do this using XmlTextWriter or another related class?

What do you mean saying "supress"? XmlTextWriter exposes WriteXXX
methods, which allows to write XML. And it's your responsibility to call
them or not.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, XmlInsider]
http://blog.tkachenko.com

[T Conti]

"Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]" <oleg@no_!spam!_please!tkachenko.com> wrote in message news:<uD**************@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl>...

T Conti wrote:

I am currently writing a .Net handler to replace an ASP page. The ASP
module used a COM dll to format XML. This dll was pretty robust and
it auto-suppressed empty elements and attributes. A developer in my
group is porting the code into .Net, but I an still believe that there
is a way to do this in the native .Net classes. Is anyone familiar
with a way to do this using XmlTextWriter or another related class?

What do you mean saying "supress"? XmlTextWriter exposes WriteXXX
methods, which allows to write XML. And it's your responsibility to call
them or not.

Thanks for your posting...

The situation I am running into is that I write several nested
elements, but then I find that there are not valid values or
attributes for those elements. I wanted a quick way to purge out
those elements. You are correct that I know my data structure and I
could structure the XML around the data. I wanted to keep my XML
class generic for reuse. Here is an example of what I would like to
do:

<element1>
<element2></element2>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

I would like to remove produce the resulting XML:
<element1>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

Thanks again for your input...

[Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]]

T Conti wrote:

The situation I am running into is that I write several nested
elements, but then I find that there are not valid values or
attributes for those elements. I wanted a quick way to purge out
those elements. You are correct that I know my data structure and I
could structure the XML around the data. I wanted to keep my XML
class generic for reuse. Here is an example of what I would like to
do:

<element1>
<element2></element2>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

I would like to remove produce the resulting XML:
<element1>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

There is no such built-in functionality. You could write custom
XmlWriter, which skips empty elements. That's not rocket a engineering
indeed.

--
Oleg Tkachenko [XML MVP, XmlInsider]
http://blog.tkachenko.com

[T Conti]

"Oleg Tkachenko [MVP]" <oleg@NO!SPAM!PLEASEtkachenko.com> wrote in message news:<uV**************@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl>...

T Conti wrote:

The situation I am running into is that I write several nested
elements, but then I find that there are not valid values or
attributes for those elements. I wanted a quick way to purge out
those elements. You are correct that I know my data structure and I
could structure the XML around the data. I wanted to keep my XML
class generic for reuse. Here is an example of what I would like to
do:

<element1>
<element2></element2>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

I would like to remove produce the resulting XML:
<element1>
<element3 attr1="attr1"></element3>
</element1>

There is no such built-in functionality. You could write custom
XmlWriter, which skips empty elements. That's not rocket a engineering
indeed.

Thanks...