Retrieving XML data

Question

I am using the following function to receive XML data from a URL.

Is there a more efficient method for retrieving this XML data?

Public Function UserLocation() As String
 Try
 Dim XML As Object = Server.CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument.6.0")
 Dim getXML As String = "<URL>"
 XML.async = "false"
 XML.resolveExternals = "false"
 XML.setProperty("ServerHTTPRequest", True)
 XML.Load(getXML)
 Return XML.documentElement.SelectSingleNode("name").Text
 Catch e As Exception
 Return False
 End Try
End Function

• Phrancis: Welcome to Code Review! I hope you get some great answers.
• Disappointed: as for me, it's an awful way to work with XML
• Roland Illig: What exactly do you mean by efficient? In terms of code size, this is already efficient. How can you ever return a boolean from a function that is declared to return a string?

Answer 1

I am giving code feedback based on c# however I think you can apply that to vb.

You can leverage the HttpWebRequest class to extract the xml response.

public static XmlDocument MakeRequest(string requestUrl)
{
 try
 {
 HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(requestUrl) as HttpWebRequest;
 HttpWebResponse response = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse; 
 XmlDocument xmlDoc = new XmlDocument();
 xmlDoc.Load(response.GetResponseStream());
 return (xmlDoc); 
 }
 catch (Exception e)
 {
 Console.WriteLine(e.Message); 
 Console.Read();
 return null;
 }
}

Then you can invoke the function with requested url which has xml response.

XmlDocument locationsResponse = MakeRequest(locationsRequest);
ProcessResponse(locationsResponse);

Now in the ProcessResponse function you can extract the value from XmlDocument using either XPath query or linq to xml.

 static public void ProcessResponse(XmlDocument doc)
 {
 // Here you query the doc.. 
 }