Read XML to Excel and back (maintain relationships)

Question

Okay so I have the ability to write the XML to an excel file pretty easily (using Aspose.Cells) so that isn't the problem, I just need to figure out how I should write it into Excel so that I can maintain the relationships that the original XML document had.

Example XML Doc:

<configData>
  <Items>
    <ItemId>1234</ItemId>
    <Description>Blah</Description>
  </Items>
  <Discounts>
    <Discount>
      <Detail>Heres the details</Detail>
      <Description>Description</Description>
    </Discount>
  </Discounts>
</configData>

These XML files actually drill down further than this, but this is just for the example.

What I originally did was import the XML into a DataSet object, which worked well, I could save that directly back to an XML file and it would maintain the proper format, since it has the relationships and the nested property is set to true.

The problem is when using Aspose.Cells to write this to Excel, there is no way to maintain these relationships when I import it back in. The way I exported it was to export each DataTable in the DataSet to a different worksheet, so the data could be easily edited and then uploaded back into a DataSet easily, but now I need to get it back into the proper nested XML.

Help! Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

The solution was exporting this to a dataset, and then saving the .xslt from the dataset which is one of the built in functions of .net, and still exporting the data to separate worksheets, importing it back in in opposite order, and then applying the .xslt to bring back the relationships.