Serialization

The XdmSerializerXdmSerializerXdmSerializer is an implementation of XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization. It is similar to XmlWriterXmlWriterXmlWriter except for the following differences.

• XdmSerializerXdmSerializerXdmSerializer supports the full set of parameters as specified in XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization.
• XdmSerializerXdmSerializerXdmSerializer operates on sequences of items (both nodes and atomic values), rather than an XML token stream.

The XdmSerializationSettingsXdmSerializationSettingsXdmSerializationSettings class exposes all the different serialization settings.

If you are serializing the result of an XQuery program, then the serialization settings that should be used are specified in XQuery.SerializationSettingsXQuery.SerializationSettingsXQuery::SerializationSettings. The settings specified by the query are the settings that were specified in XQuerySettings.SerializationSettingsXQuerySettings.SerializationSettingsXQuerySettings::SerializationSettings augmented by any relevant declare option declarations in the query itself.

The serialization settings are then passed to the constructor of XdmSerializerXdmSerializerXdmSerializer to create a serializer with the specified settings.

The following code shows how to create a serializer that produces indented HTML.

XdmSerializationSettings serializationSettings = new XdmSerializationSettings(XdmSerializationSettings.HtmlOutputMethod);
settings.Indent = true;

XdmSerializer serializer = new XdmSerializer(settings);

Once you have constructed a serializer, you can use it to serialize an item or item sequence to a document. This is done via the XdmSerializer.SerializeXdmSerializer.SerializeXdmSerializer::Serialize method. The serializer does the job of serializing nodes and writing them out to a stream. Here is an example of saving the result of a query (stored in query) to a file (out.xml).

XPathItemCollection result = query.Evaluate(...);

using (Stream stream = File.Create("out.xml"))
{
serializer.Serialize(result, stream);
}