Disclaimer: This is a cross-post from my professional website. It's a tutorial for a product my company sells.

The Dangl.AVA & Dangl.GAEB libraries allow you to work easily and fast with GAEB data files. The core functionality of these libraries is to offer import and export features.

Often, our customers do have an existing data structure, for example in their content management system. For such use cases, the GAEB & AVA .Net Libraries are ideal to convert from your own, internal data structure to GAEB.

Different Ways to Export Data

There are three main ways how you can export GAEB data:

• You're using the Dangl.AVA module and its interface to create a project structure. Then, you convert to any GAEB format via Dangl.AVA.Converter. Most of the GAEB features are accessible this way. The following examples will focus on this procedure.
• With Dangl.GAEB, it's possible to work natively with the GAEB data formats in .Net. You have full control over all details and decide how exactly the GAEB file should look.
• You combine both methods. You do most of the work with Dangl.AVA, then convert via Dangl.AVA.Converter and supply a custom Plugin for the export process to inject your own logic in the creation of the GAEB data. This gives you the best combination of time-saved due to the unified project structure while still having full control to customize the export.

The Data Export in Detail

The following two code snippets are based on the sample projects (download) and will show you how fast and easy it is to create GAEB data via the API. The examples are written in C#.

The TutorialFileGenerator class shows you how to export a Dangl.AVA.Project to all three major GAEB formats and then saves them to disk as System.IO.Stream.

In the second part, the actual generation of the data structure in the form of a Dangl.AVA.Project is demonstrated. You will see how easy it is to map your internal structure to GAEB.

Do you have any additional questions? You can find further information and API examples in the documentation. Additionally, customers with a maintenance subscription have full insight into the source code. You find a lot of interesting examples in the test projects.