When it comes down to low-level work, the text view of XML Spy is ideally suited for XML editing in its textual or source form.
You can use the Find and Replace commands to quickly locate or change any information and XML Spy offers unlimited levels of Undo and Redo for all your editing operations. Intelligent Editing If you are working with an XML document that is based on a DTD or Schema, XML Spy provides you with various intelligent editing capabilities. As soon as you start typing the name of an XML element, attribute, or attribute value, you will get a popup window that shows all available choices and lets you quickly select the correct name using your mouse or the arrow keys on your keyboard. Simply hit the Return or Space key to accept the selected choice and close the popup window.
Auto-completion With many other tools, editing in the text view can quickly result in unbalanced brackets, elements that are not closed properly, or other ugly violations of the well-formedness principle. XML Spy helps you in avoiding this disaster, by automatically completing the element as well as inserting all required attributes as soon as you complete entering the element name on your keyboard. The cursor is then positioned between the start and end tag of the element so that you can easily continue to add child elements or contents:
You can use the Check well-formedness command at any time during your editing session to ensure that the document meets the XML 1.0 Specification criteria for well-formedness. This check is also automatically performed every time you open or save a document. Mouse & Context-Menu You can, of course, also use the mouse for editing in the Text View. If you select any text, you can either use drag&drop to move the text block to a new location or you can use the context-menu on the right mouse button to directly access frequently used editing commands - such as Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Send by Mail, and Go to line/char:
While most customers prefer the enhanced grid or database/table views for every-day work on XML data files, the text view can occasionally be very handy when editing XSL files or if you are using Active Server Pages (ASP) or any other non-XML files in your web solution. |
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