Does an XPathDocument load the whole xml document?

Question

If I do

XPathDocument doc = new XPathDocument("filename.xml");

Does that load the entire document into memory? I'm writing a mobile phone app and the document might store lots of data that doesn't ever need to all be loaded at the same time. Mobile phones don't usually have too much ram!

Answer 1

Yes, the whole XML document is represented in memory.

One solution is to split a large XML document into many smaller ones.

Or, alternatively, you may write your own XmlReader that will ignore unwanted subtrees. You can pass this XmlReader as argument to the XpathDocument() constructor -- need to camouflage it as TextReader.