If you have ever tried downloading XML form from the Forms library through code you might have realized that the downloaded file is no longer XML. 

Here is the code –

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
client.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
string strXMLFile = “<siteURL>” + item.Url;
string strPath = @”D:\\” + listName + “\\” + item.Title;
client.DownloadFile(strXMLFile, strPath);
}

If you try the above code then you will be presented a HTML document but not the actual XML. In order to get around this issue you just need to add the parameter ?NoRedirect=true. What this actually tells the server is not to send the information to the forms server to be formatted. This just downloads the XML as it is. If you try the NoRedirect Parameter on IE then it will ask you where to download the file.

So, my final code looks like –

using (WebClient client = new WebClient())
{
client.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
string strXMLFile = “<siteURL>” + item.Url?NoRedirect=false;
string strPath = @”D:\\” + listName + “\\” + item.Title;
client.DownloadFile(strXMLFile, strPath);
}

I hope this helps someone 🙂