XSLT Transform in C# (a piece of cake)

Whilst there are times when I'd rather be rubbing Dorset Naga chillies in my eyes, most days I'm glad I develop in C# on the .Net framework. Take today for example. I needed to look into manipulating XML via XSLT; a powerful transformation language for XML. I thought it would take a while, around 3 hours; but with the powerful .Net library I had built a win forms app that takes XML input, XSLT input and outputs the transformation - all in under 30 mins! Long live .Net!

Below is the XSLT util class I created for anyone interested.

public class XsltUtil { /// <summary> /// Transforms the supplied xml using the supplied xslt and returns the /// result of the transformation /// </summary> /// <param name="xml">The xml to be transformed</param> /// <param name="xslt">The xslt to transform the xml</param> /// <returns>The transformed xml</returns> public static string TransformXml(string xml, string xslt) { // Simple data checks if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(xml)) { throw new ArgumentException("Param cannot be null or empty", "xml"); } if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(xslt)) { throw new ArgumentException("Param cannot be null or empty", "xslt"); } // Create required readers for working with xml and xslt StringReader xsltInput = new StringReader(xslt); StringReader xmlInput = new StringReader(xml); XmlTextReader xsltReader = new XmlTextReader(xsltInput); XmlTextReader xmlReader = new XmlTextReader(xmlInput); // Create required writer for output StringWriter stringWriter = new StringWriter(); XmlTextWriter transformedXml = new XmlTextWriter(stringWriter); // Create a XslCompiledTransform to perform transformation XslCompiledTransform xsltTransform = new XslCompiledTransform(); try { xsltTransform.Load(xsltReader); xsltTransform.Transform(xmlReader, transformedXml); } catch (XmlException xmlEx) { // TODO : log - "Could not load XSL transform: \n\n" + xmlEx.Message throw; } catch (XsltException xsltEx) { // TODO : log - "Could not process the XSL: \n\n" + xsltEx.Message + "\nOn line " + xsltEx.LineNumber + " @ " + xsltEx.LinePosition) throw; } catch (Exception ex) { // TODO : log throw; } return stringWriter.ToString(); } }