Adding stylesheet to XML document.

I am currently working on a web enhancement where XML datas are passed on the response object. It seems that the website will serve as a service point for some request. Since it is in XML format, it can be consumed by some applications with minimal parsing. Even with javascripts and XSLT too, which makes it really flexible.

Right after it is fetched from the database, the result is in Scalar form XML, thanks to SQL's XML PATH, which removes XML parsing from data resultset.

Doing this with XML LINQ is pretty easy.

XDocument xml = XDocument.Parse(stringFromDataBaseScalarResult);
var pi = new XProcessingInstruction("xml-stylesheet","type=\"text/xsl\" href=\"yourxslfile.xsl\"");
xml.Root.AddBeforeSelf(pi);
doc.Save(Response.Output);




or without LINQ




XmlDocument xml = new XmlDocument();
xml.LoadXml(stringFromDataBaseScalarResult);
XmlProcessingInstruction pi = xml.CreateProcessingInstruction("xml-stylesheet","type=\"text/xsl\" href=\"yourxslfile.xsl\"");
xml.InsertBefore(pi,xml.DocumentElement);
xml.Save(Response.Output);


I have to find some better clean way on the second one, because my initial attempt using Append method placed the processing instruction at the bottom of the xml document, although the stylesheet is still applied. It is an eyesore to some. (including me... hehe).