Dot Net Thoughts

After doing an XPath selection using .Net, using XmlDocument.SelectNodes(), it will return XMLNodeList class, sometimes we required to convert the XMLNodeList to Data Table for binding purposes. I couldn’t find a direct way, only way is using looping through the Nodes.

/// <summary>
    /// Converts an XMLNodelist object to data table.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="xmlNodeList">The XMLNodeList to convert to DataTable.</param>
    /// <param name="Columns">The columns required for the DataTable, using this parameter the
    /// data will be fetched from xmlnodelist.</param>
    /// <returns>DataTable with columns specified in the Columns parameter</returns>
    public DataTable XmlNodeListToDataTable(XmlNodeList xmlNodeList, string[] Columns)
    {
        //Creating the DataTable.
        using (DataTable dataTable = new DataTable("DataTable"))
        {
            //Adding data Table columns based on the columns parameter
            foreach (string column in Columns)
            {
                dataTable.Columns.Add(column);
            }
            //Adding rows with values.
            DataRow dataRow;
            foreach (XmlNode node in xmlNodeList)
            {
                dataRow = dataTable.NewRow();
                foreach (string column in Columns)
                {
                    dataRow[column] = node.SelectSingleNode(column).InnerText;
                }
                dataTable.Rows.Add(dataRow);
            }
            return dataTable;
        }
    }

You can also create the columns dynamically, but you need to check for duplicate Data Columns.