Data at the root level is invalid [duplicate]

Question

I have the following XML document:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Offices id="0" enabled="false">
  <office />
</Offices>

When I try to access it through C#:

XmlDocument doc = new XmlDocument();
doc.LoadXml(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("officeList.xml"));

I get this error:

Data at the root level is invalid. Line 1, position 1.

What is wrong with this line?

Answer 1

This:

doc.LoadXml(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("officeList.xml"));

should be:

doc.Load(HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("officeList.xml"));

LoadXml() is for loading an XML string, not a file name.

Answer 2

For the record:

"Data at the root level is invalid" means that you have attempted to parse something that is not an XML document. It doesn't even start to look like an XML document. It usually means just what you found: you're parsing something like the string "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\mysite\officelist.xml".

Answer 3

I found that the example I was using had an xml document specification on the first line. I was using a stylesheet I got at this blog entry and the first line was

<?xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>

which was causing the error. When I removed that line, so that the stylesheet started with the line

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:DTS="www.microsoft.com/SqlServer/Dts" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">

my transform worked. By the way, that blog post was the first good, easy-to follow example I have found for trying to get information from the XML definition of an SSIS package, but I did have to modify the paths in the example for my SSIS 2008 packages, so you might too. I also created a version to extract the "flow" from the precedence constraints. My final one looks like this:

    <xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:DTS="www.microsoft.com/SqlServer/Dts" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform">
    <xsl:output method="text" encoding="utf-8" />
    <xsl:template match="/">
    <xsl:text>From,To~</xsl:text>
    <xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
    <xsl:for-each select="//DTS:PrecedenceConstraints/DTS:PrecedenceConstraint">
      <xsl:value-of select="@DTS:From"/>
      <xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
      <xsl:value-of select="@DTS:To"/>
       <xsl:text>~</xsl:text>
      <xsl:text>
</xsl:text>
    </xsl:for-each>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

and gave me a CSV with the tilde as my line delimiter. I replaced that with a line feed in my text editor then imported into excel to get a with look at the data flow in the package.