Sometimes you need the basic features of a database but don't want the
hassle, and possibly cost, of creating one for a small application. With
the .NET DataSet
object and a simple XML document we can emulate the basic
features of a database. In this example, we use an XML document which
stores our product information. We want to look up a product by SKU and
return the price and description to a Web page.
We have three products in our list. The following is a basic XML document,
productlist.xml
, containing our data:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <ProductList> <Products> <SKU>1</SKU> <Price>100.00</Price> <Description>Widget #1</Description> </Products> <Products> <SKU>2</SKU> <Price>10.00</Price> <Description>Widget #2</Description> </Products> <Products> <SKU>3</SKU> <Price>30.00</Price> <Description>Widget #3</Description> </Products> </ProductList>
If you think of this document in terms of a database, the data within the
ProductList
tags are our database. The data within the Products
tags are a
table in the database. SKU
, Price
, and Descriptions
are columns in the Products
table. Just like a database, we want to return a row of values,
given a column value.
Comments