Remembering the Future

Thom Robbins is a great guy, but unfortunately for him he has bumped into one of my major pet peeves, Viral Coding Examples with his Introducing the XmlTextReader post. It really isn’t his fault, since the code he uses is very similar to the code example in the XmlTextReader.Read() documentation

. . .

So, what is a better example for an introduction to the XmlTextReader?  Explicitly control when a Read is executed.

XmlRead.WhitespaceHandling = WhitespaceHandling.None
Dim Continue as Boolean
If xmlRead.Read = False then
    Continue = False
End If
While Continue
    If xmlRead.IsStartElement then
        If xmlRead.Name = “level2” then
            MsgBox(xmlRead.ReadInnerXml())
        Else
            Continue = xmlRead.Read()
        End If
    Else
        Continue = xmlRead.Read()
    End If
End While

Now we have explicit control over when a Read is executed, and in the case of rogue methods that place your cursor to the next node (that you haven’t tested yet), you can skip the implicit Read.

Topics: XML