Fred Chateau wrote:
> I have a large amount of XML data, which must be imported into SQL Server.
> 
> I wrote a program in C#, which uses XMLReader to read the records and pass the node values into a 
> SQL data object. It doesn't work, however, because the XML is structured so that when the value for 
> a node is null, the node is missing. This causes the XMLReader to fall through to the next record, 
> until it finds a record with the desired node present. Furthermore, although there are schemas 
> provided with the data, they cannot be relied on to be an accurate representation of the XML.
> 
> Is there another .NET XML technology that would allow me to read these records accurately, with or 
> without the provided schemas?

If the W3C XML schema language would be used then null values would not 
be represented by missing elements but rather by using e.g.
   <xs:element name="foo" type="xs:int" nillable="true"/>
in the schema and e.g.
   <foo xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:nil="true"/>
in the XML instance document.

As for checking whether a certain element is missing, you can do that 
with XPath for instance. So using XPathDocument/XPathNavigator would 
allow you to check whether certain child elements exist.

-- 

	Martin Honnen --- MVP XML
	http://JavaScript.FAQTs.com/