How make XMLDocument do not put spaces on self-closed tags?

Question

I have an XML well formatted without any spaces. It' must be like that.

When I load it to XMLDocument to sign, the self-closing tags gets an extra white space and

    <cEAN/>

becomes:

     <cEAN />

Once this document must be signed, it's impossible to remove the white space.

The property PreserveWhiteSpace doesn't made any difference to the result.

How can I change this behavior?

Aberrant

I'm curious. What is consuming the XML such that it can't deal with the spaces? – Crumpet

It was my understanding that the space before the forwardslash was dictated by the standard. – Protege

@Bradley: no. I don't believe the standard dictates serialization format to that degree. – Bianco

What sort of signature is required? XML Digital Signature? – Bianco

Digital Signature with an X509 Certificate – Paravane

This one? – Bianco

Answer 1

There is no space before the closing "/" in the XmlDocument. XmlDocument is a data structure consisting of nodes. It is binary. It is not text.

Any extra space you are seeing exists only when you serialize the document as text.

Are you actually having a problem with signing, or do you only think you will have such a problem?

Bianco

You are right about the serialization. And I'm having a problem with an Governmental Agency, who demmands the extra space to be removed. – Paravane

Tell them to go learn XML. Remind them it's an International standard. – Bianco

@spender: I know it's hard (ok, impossible), but we've got to try, otherwise, we'll be back to having no standards at all. I remember those days. The market for Software Engineers was much smaller back then, and lack of standardization was one of the main reasons. – Bianco

Answer 2

I have had this problem before. XML signed by a basic Hash so it can't change when serialized. I solved it by writing a serializer so that I could be sure that it would output the correct XML.

The basic recipe is to Read the XML with a XMLReader, and write out each chunk as it comes.

Congressional

Answer 3

Try this:

XMLDocument doc;

...

string XMLstring = doc.OuterXml.Replace(" />","/>");

Rios

Answer 4

The way I figured it out is as follows:

1. Create a stream:

    var stream = new MemoryStream();

2. Create your XML and save it to the stream:

           var writerSettings = new XmlWriterSettings
            {
                Indent = true,
                IndentChars = "    ",
                NewLineChars = Environment.NewLine,
                NewLineHandling = NewLineHandling.Replace,
                OmitXmlDeclaration = true,
            };

            using (var xrmService = new XrmServiceContext(context.Service))
            using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(stream, writerSettings))
            {
                writer.WriteStartElement("xyz");
                writer.WriteElementString("abc", "123");
                ...
                writer.WriteEndElement();
                writer.Flush();
            }

3. Convert Stream to String in order to be able reformat

    string stringXml = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(stream.ToArray()).Replace(" />", "/>");

4. Convert String back to Stream in order to be able to write to file

   
    byte[] byteArray = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(stringXml);
          MemoryStream formattedStream = new MemoryStream(byteArray);
   

5. Write Stream to file

    using (FileStream file = new FileStream(@"filepath\file.xml", 
               FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write))
                {
                    formattedStream.CopyTo(file);
                    file.Flush();
                }
                formattedStream.Flush();

Resources that has help me to achieve this:

• Save XML content to a variable
• Convert String to System.IO.Stream
• Save and load MemoryStream to/from a file

Meeker