XML Document Creation

There are two ways to create an XML document. One way is to create an XmlDocument with no parameters. The other way is to create an XmlDocument and pass it an XmlNameTable as a parameter. The following example shows how to create a new, empty XmlDocument using no parameters.

Dim doc As New XmlDocument()  
XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();  

Once a document is created, you can load it with data from a string, stream, URL, text reader, or an XmlReader derived class using the Load method. There is also another load method, the LoadXML method, which reads XML from a string. For more information on the various Load methods, see Reading an XML Document into the DOM.

There is a class called the XmlNameTable. This class is a table of atomized string objects. This table provides an efficient means for the XML parser to use the same string object for all repeated element and attribute names in an XML document. An XmlNameTable is automatically created when a document is created as shown above and is loaded with attribute and element names when the document is loaded. If you already have a document with a name table, and those names would be useful in another document, you can create a new document using the Load method that takes an XmlNameTable as a parameter. When the document is created with this method, it uses the existing XmlNameTable with all the attributes and elements already loaded into it from the other document. It can be used for efficiently comparing element and attribute names. For more information on the XmlNameTable, see Object Comparison Using XmlNameTable. For reference, see XmlNameTable.

See also