How to Associate Custom Data with XMLNode object? "Ignoramus" <oleg.krupnov[ at ]gmail.com> 12.09.2006 16:23:25 What is the best way of associating application-defined data with XMLNode objects? Word's XMLNode object doesn't unfortunately have the Tag property (like many other Office objects), where I could store some data. Also I can't create a Dictionary, because XMLNode objects cannot be used as dictionary keys - they are obviously (like Range objects) volatile views of some opaque internal objects. In other words, (node1 is node2) can be false even if node1 and node2 are actually the same node in the source XML. Another option is to use what I call "paths", i.e. an array of integers where each element represents the index in the array of sibling nodes of the current parent node, recursively. This method would be great but it goes broke when the XMLAfterInsert event fires in result of the "apply tag" command (the event is not fired for the child nodes wrapped by the new node). In that case the paths of the child nodes change and no longer can be resolved, because the event is fired AFTER the XML has already been changed. The last brute force option I'm considering is to introduce a persistent attribute for each XML node, containing some kind of unique identifier and to reference custom data by that id. The problem is however that this service attribute can be occasionally changed/removed by the user and the approach will fail. Also, I'd not like to introduce extra data not desired by the user. Am I missing the right way of doing it? Please advice.