What's the best way to do this?

Question

I am creating a small app for myself that I will use to take notes. I want it to take small rtf files that I create in a RichTextBox control and organize them by notebook and subcategory. Each file should be one notebook - for instance, a philosophy notebook. Each notebook will have subcategories, and each subcategory will have note entries that are organized by date. I want each notebook/file to actually work like an online weblog where each entry can be posted in more than one category.

But my question has more to do with saving and retrieving the files. I am not familiar enough with programming to know much about file I/O, so what is a good way to do this? How can I save a list of blocks of rtf, and keep the correct heirarchical structure?

Any advice is welcome, and thanks in advance!

Ronald · Answer

Wow thanks a lot! I am sure this will help out greatly.

Mahesh Chand · Answer

Actually using XML is very easy. Here is a simple EBook available free. http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/mahesh/XmlProgramming09142007082751AM/XmlProgramming.aspx

Ronald · Answer

Thanks very much. I had thought of using XML though not as a solution to this problem. I am just not very familiar with XML either - but I love to learn. If I understand correctly though XML does not store any code about the format of the text. How would I handle this within a windows application? Which control would I use to format the text? Couldn't I just store strings of rtf text within the XML file itself? Or will this incur the overhead you mentioned?

Mahesh Chand · Answer

If you want to do this in RTF files you may tag the lines for directory and subdirectories. For example you can have something like this: Root: Meetings Parent: Personal Child: Today is my meeting with doctor. Root: Meetings Parent: Personal Child: Today my meeting is with my wife. ============================== Personally I think RTF is not a good idea to store structured data. Your IO cost will be too much and parsing will take more time than using database or XML documents.