Visual Basic

14-Oct-09 22:15

Hi there,

I'm a complete nube to this but I need a piece of code that will do the following:

Look inside a large XML file and remove all the entries of

Folder fullpath= (in this case Y:\HQ\)

SizeData Size= (in this case 172204891364)

Put them somewhere (bearing in mind that an Excel doc is limited to 52000 ish rows) and in a form that I can compare this iteration of the XML data to a previous one to allow a comparison of each "SizeData Size=" and "Folder fullpath=" to get growth statistics for each folder

The XML data is in the form below; there is one for each folder and there are 10's of thousands of them.

<Folder fullpath="Y:\HQ\" IsFilesNode="0">
<Name>HQ</Name>
<Attributes>16</Attributes>
<LastAccessDate Low="1344632870" High="30030880"/>
<LastChangeDate Low="4221838626" High="30030879"/>
<CreationDate Low="4129018994" High="29882626"/>
<SizeData Size="172204891364" Allocated="173345047862" Wasted="1138287388" CDRom="172711966720" Files="443755" Folders="42448" Compression="1"/>
<FilesSizeData Size="0" Allocated="0" Wasted="0" CDRom="0" Files="0" Folders="3" Compression="1"/>

I will be able to get the comparison stuff sorted out, but my issue is getting the data out of the XML file in a form that I can manipulate.

Any help gratefully revieved..

Tom Deketelaere14-Oct-09 22:37

14-Oct-09 22:37

nhsal69 wrote:
I'm a complete nube to this but I need a piece of code that will do the following:

0) don't just ask for code, nobody is going to just give you this.

1) Look into the system.xml namespace
some things to get you started:

system.xml.xmldocument
system.xml.xmlelement

nhsal69 wrote:
Put them somewhere (bearing in mind that an Excel doc is limited to 52000 ish rows)

2) Why even consider Excel? if this is data (the comparison) doesn't need to be saved then just put them in memory (Datatable or something like it)
If it does need to be saved, at the very least go to Access, SQL server would be better.

nhsal69 wrote:
The XML data is in the form below; there is one for each folder and there are 10's of thousands of them.

3) That's a lot of files, take into account that this will most likely take very long to process all of them.

nhsal6914-Oct-09 22:58

14-Oct-09 22:58

[quote]

0) don't just ask for code, nobody is going to just give you this.

[/quote]

fair point...

Have been looking at XML File Parsing in VB.NET[^] and been getting more and more confused, can get the example to work, but can't modify it to get it to read the elements I'm after from the example above...

Getting both fields written into a table in SQL, would be ideal..

Will look at your suggestions, ta...

Tom Deketelaere14-Oct-09 23:44

14-Oct-09 23:44

Your XML file isn't build as neatly as could be still it's doable.

Where are you stuck?

a bit more to get you going (assuming you posted the exact and full XML):

You read the XML in with 'xmldocument.load(path)' 

Your first element = 'Folder'
This element has 2 attributes: 'fullpath' and 'IsFilesNode'

Your second element = 'Name'
This element has NONE attributes so you'll have to read the 'InnerText' of the element to get your data

...

This (together with the article) should be enough to find your answer

Also note that when reading these element / attributes XML is case-sensitive (from what I can remember)

nhsal6915-Oct-09 3:20

15-Oct-09 3:20

Hey there,

thanks for the info, I have got it working, in the sense that I can remove the /root type value and manipulate that but anything further down the XML file and I get no output.

Below I have copied the Full XML code as I'm guessing that all the <root>, <Application> etc is stopping my code from searching the <folder> and <sizedata> elements that I'm actually after.

Is there a way of ignoring all the other stuff and just getting what I'm after, I dunno masking it out or something??

Thanks again...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>

<Root Type="TRoot">
<Application>TreeSize Professional</Application>
<Version>5.2.3 (5.2.3.505)</Version>
<Date>15/10/2009 12:30:08</Date>
<Path>C:\</Path>
<ExcludePatterns>
<pattern>*~SNAPSHOT*</pattern>
</ExcludePatterns>
<IncludePatterns>
<pattern>*</pattern>
</IncludePatterns>
<ArchiveBitFilesOnly>0</ArchiveBitFilesOnly>
<ExcludeOfflineFiles>0</ExcludeOfflineFiles>
<CreatedPastDaysOnly>0</CreatedPastDaysOnly>
<Filesystem>NTFS</Filesystem>
<BytesPerCluster>4096</BytesPerCluster>
<Compressed>0</Compressed>
<FileBasedCompression>-1</FileBasedCompression>
<FoldersOccupySpace>0</FoldersOccupySpace>
<IsCompared>0</IsCompared>
<Title>Drive: Local Disk (C Smile | :)

</Title>
<UserDefinedClusterSize>0</UserDefinedClusterSize>
<UsedBytesOnDrive>80023715840</UsedBytesOnDrive>
<FreeBytesOnDrive>7445061632</FreeBytesOnDrive>
<DoCreateFileAges FileAgesDateType="1">-1</DoCreateFileAges>
<Folder fullpath="C:\" IsFilesNode="0">
<Name>C:\</Name>
<Attributes>0</Attributes>
<LastAccessDate Low="322843223" High="30035338"/>
<LastChangeDate Low="322843223" High="30035338"/>
<CreationDate Low="0" High="0"/>
<SizeData Size="74609238013" Allocated="72396726232" Wasted="234062016" CDRom="74727184384" Files="116733" Folders="12272" Compression="3"/>
<FilesSizeData Size="18745407271" Allocated="18745561088" Wasted="153817" CDRom="18745475072" Files="69" Folders="0" Compression="1"/>
<Folder fullpath="C:\" IsFilesNode="-1">

Tom Deketelaere15-Oct-09 3:30

15-Oct-09 3:30

nhsal69 wrote:
Is there a way of ignoring all the other stuff and just getting what I'm after, I dunno masking it out or something??

Yes bye using the xmldocument class.

Alright here's a small code snippet.

Dim odoc as new system.xml.xmldocument
odoc.load("path to the xml file goes here")

dim fullpath as string=""
dim node as system.xml.xmlnode= odoc.selectnode("Folder")
fullpath = foldernode.attributes.getnameditem("fullpath")

dim name as string
node = odoc.selectnode("Name")
name=node.innertext

That should get you the fullpath and name in the xml document.

I didn't test or compile the code (it's from memory) so small adjustments might be in order.

nhsal6915-Oct-09 21:59

15-Oct-09 21:59

thats great ta for that....

One question tho..

I get an error when compiling on this line:

Dim node As System.Xml.XmlNode = odoc.SelectNodes("Folder")
now the error is "value of type System.xml.XmlNodeList cannot be converted to System.Xml.XmlNode"

followed by:

fullpath = foldernode.Attributes.GetNamedItem("fullpath")
with an error of "System.Xml.XmlNode cannot be converted to String.

Am I missing something here? Can this element be converted to a variable?

Tom Deketelaere15-Oct-09 22:39

15-Oct-09 22:39

nhsal69 wrote:
Dim node As System.Xml.XmlNode = odoc.SelectNodes("Folder")

it's 'SelectSingleNode'

nhsal69 wrote:
fullpath = foldernode.Attributes.GetNamedItem("fullpath")

it's 'foldernode.attributes.getnameditem("fullpath").value'

(did say it was from memory, guess my memory is getting holes in it)

nhsal6916-Oct-09 0:42

16-Oct-09 0:42

Thanks again, I would like to point out that your holy memory contains a lot more than my vaguely complete one...

Right this is what I have so far:

Dim odoc As New System.Xml.XmlDocument

odoc.Load("c:\file.xml")

Dim fullpath As String = ""

Dim node As System.Xml.XmlNode = odoc.SelectSingleNode("Folder")

fullpath = foldernode.Attributes.GetNamedItem("fullpath").Value

Dim name As String

node = odoc.SelectSingleNode("Name")
name = node.InnerText

Console.Write("Folder: " & fullpath _& " FullPathValue: " & fullpath & " SizeValue: " _& name)

Console.Write(vbCrLf)

Console.Read()

Catch errorVariable As Exception

Console.Write(errorVariable.ToString())
Console.Read()

Ignore the Console Write stuff, I just want it to write somthing to the console so that I can see it working...

However, this give an "System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object." error for the "foldernode" in the "foldernode.Attributes.Ge....." line.

Any thoughts as to why?

Tom Deketelaere16-Oct-09 1:07

16-Oct-09 1:07

replace 'foldernode' with node

nhsal6916-Oct-09 1:24