Can I Get The Visual of a Document That I have the XML and Schema of?

Question

I am reading XML files which are actually e-invoices. They have a standart XML format and I was wondering if I could get the visual of the e-invoice from the XML. All the places I have looked on the Internet are showing the opposite(how to read XML, which I do already) so I could not find an answer so far. Thank you. I am using C# in case if anyone needs it.

Answer 1

There is no such thing as "the visual" of an XML document. The point about XML is that you can render the document any way you like. The conventional way to produce a visual rendition is with XSLT (typically converting to HTML or to PDF via XSL-FO), but in simple cases you can also do it using CSS. Try to avoid getting into low-level C# coding for this: you may think you're saving effort by using a tool you're already familiar with, but the code will be very laborious.

If the XML vocabulary for your e-invoices is standardised, then of course there may be widely-used XSLT stylesheets for rendering them, which you could re-use or customize rather than having to write your own. But that would be something specific to this particular XML vocabulary.