Extending MFC Applications with the .NET Framework

The DOM and the XmlDocument Class

As the XmlDocument class is an encapsulation of the DOM (Document Object Model), let's first get a basic overview of what the DOM is and how the capabilities it provides compare with what you've learned up to this point.

The DOM is an in-memory representation of an XML document that allows you to read, edit, and save XML data. However, unlike the XmlTextWriter/XmlTextReader class pair, the DOM doesn't view the XML data in a linear fashion. Instead, when the DOM loads an XML document, the document is parsed, and the data is represented as a tree of related nodes. As an example, take a look the following, more expanded, version of our earlier BookDetail XML document:

 <?xml version="1.0"?> <BookDetail> <Book ISBN="032117352X"> ...