Write and read data from XML file through VB.Net at launch

Question

I started doing some applications in VB.Net in the past year and a half and despite all my research for an answer, nothing has worked fine enough for me, so here I am, asking my

Answer 1

Use XML Serialization. IMO this is superior to using XDocuments in most cases. You will have an object with children which represent your xml file contents. You can iterate of the children, and everything is strongly-typed.

Start by creating VB.NET classes to represent your data

Option Strict On

Imports System.IO
Imports System.Xml.Serialization

<XmlRoot("savedData")>
Public Class SavedData
    <XmlElement("savedPassword")>
    Public Property SavedPasswords As List(Of SavedPassword)
End Class

Public Class SavedPassword
    <XmlAttribute("id")>
    Public Property ID As Byte
    <XmlElement("name")>
    Public Property Name As String
    <XmlElement("email")>
    Public Property Email As String
    <XmlElement("password")>
    Public Property Password As String
End Class

Once you have that, reading the file into your classes is pretty simple. Use the following code

Dim filename = "filename.xml"
Dim data As SavedData
Dim serializer As New XmlSerializer(GetType(SavedData))
Using sr = New StreamReader(filename)
    data = CType(serializer.Deserialize(sr), SavedData)
End Using
For Each sp In data.SavedPasswords
    Console.WriteLine($"id: '{sp.ID}', name: '{sp.Name}', email: '{sp.Email}', password: '{sp.Password}'")
Next

The only thing you need to do is to set the correct filename instead of Dim filename = "filename.xml". If the path is fixed, you can simply hard-code it

Dim filename = "C:\VelocityDK Codes\Password Manager\filename.xml"

If the path can vary such as being based on the Environment.SpecialFolder Enum you can incorporate it into the assignment:

The executing assembly needn't be in the same folder as the xml file.