How to copy XML nodes from one document to another?

[storrm]

Hi all,

I hope someone can steer me on the right track for resolving this. Basically, all I want to do is create a node list from one xmldocument and then insert the result of that xpath query into another xmldocument at a specific place. I thought this would be quite straightforward but I'm running into problems re the node attributes. This is what the xml looks like for the source and destination files

Source File :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Application version="1.5" hwrEnabled="true">
  <Name />
  <Description />
  <Pages />
  <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="">
    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
  </Item>
  <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="">
    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
  </Item>
</Application>

Destination File:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<root>
  <settings xmlns="http://www.company.com/print">
    <processors>
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
    </processors>
    <layout />
  </settings>
</root>

What I'm trying to do is copy the <Item> nodes from the source to the <layout> element in the destination file so I end up with this :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<root>
  <settings xmlns="http://www.company.com/print">
    <processors>
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
    </processors>
    <layout>
      <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="">
	    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
	    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
	  </Item>
	  <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="">
	    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
	    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
  	  </Item>
  	</layout>
  </settings>
</root>

I started with defining a nodelist for the items and a node position for the layout tag, but at this point I start to scratch my head thinking about what is the right way to do this. I'm pretty sure I should be using a combination of appendchild and importnode but I'm not sure if this can be done as a single 'move all' kind of manner or whether I need to loop through the elements in the nodelist along with their respective attributes and copy them over individually:

            Dim source As New XmlDocument
            source.Load("c:/source.xml")

            Dim destination As New XmlDocument
            destination.Load("c:/destination.xml")

            Dim items As XmlNodeList = source.SelectNodes("/Application/Item")
            Dim layout As XmlNode = destination.SelectSingleNode("/root/settings/layout")

            'code to copy items to layout

Can anyone give me a pointer as to an efficient way to achieve this?

Thanks

[techgnome]

simple .... loop through your items (hint: for each ... in ...) and append each node (hint layout.append, might be .AppendChild ... or Layout.Child[ren].Append...) to the layout node.

-tg

[storrm]

Thanks for the push :-) Initially I used the following code but received a "The node to be inserted is from a different document context" error

For Each n As XmlNode In items
   layout.AppendChild(n)
Next

Doing some research I found that the problem was to do with trying to copy nodes from one xml document to another. The answer was quite simple; use AppendChild with ImportNode :-)

For Each n As XmlNode In items
    layout.AppendChild(destination.ImportNode(n, True))
Next

Thanks again for the help.

[storrm]

Unfortunately, this didnt work 100% as I had original thought. Due to the length of the xml nodes on screen, I didnt initially see that a blank xmlns="" attribute was being added to the end of each of my imported nodes so I ended up with this :-

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<root>
  <settings xmlns="http://www.company.com/print">
    <processors>
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
      <object />
    </processors>
    <layout>
      <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="" xmlns="">
	    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
	    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
      </Item>
      <Item page="1" type="" boxes="" group="" checkedvalue="" left="" top="" name="" xmlns="">
	    <Settings presentation="" label="" x="" y="0" width=""/>
	    <Resource type="" name="" custom=""/>
      </Item>
    </layout>
  </settings>
</root>

I'm guessing that because the nodes I'm importing don't utilise a namespace and that the node they are being imported into does, vb adds the blank namespace. So how do I tell it not to? I can't see any options in either the ImportNode or AppendChild methods that allow me to specify the namespace.