Matevž Gačnik's Weblog

I just had another lenghty discussion with another developer trying to convey the benefits of XPathNavigator usage.

It seems to me, that Infoset-based access to SQL Server data can only be done using this:

• Get DataSet
• DataSet -> XmlDataDocument (constructor, which takes DataSet, public XmlDataDocument(DataSet))
• XmlDataDocument -> XPathNavigator (XmlDataDocument.CreateNavigator)

One can also create an XmlNode instead of XPathNavigator, but I prefer the XPath data model.

This seems a much more scalable solution than using "FOR XML RAW/AUTO/EXPLICIT" and populating an XmlReader with SqlCommand.ExecuteXmlReader. "FOR XML RAW/AUTO/EXPLICIT" is slow and requires an XML serialization/deserialization pair.

It's bad/wrong/sloppy, when people do that between app tiers.