Text View

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Text View

Click the Text view icon,

to open this view.

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.

The text view can be used to edit any kind of text file (even non-XML conforming documents) and offers customizable syntax-coloring (including the ability to highlight server-side VBScript or JScript code in ASP pages) as well as an automatic display of the current line and character position in the status bar.

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 based on a DTD or XML Schema, XML Spy provides you with various intelligent editing capabilities.

Type the "<" less-than character at the position you want to insert an XML element, attribute, or attribute value.

This opens a popup list.

Enter the first few characters of the item you want to insert.

An item containing those characters is highlighted.

Click on the entry with the mouse pointer, or

Use the arrow keys to highlight your selection and

Hit the Return or Space key to accept the selected choice and close the popup window.

Please note:

The popup window also appears when you edit elements or attributes in Text view. If a specific attribute is defined to follow an element, a popup window containing all valid attributes will also appear.

Eg.

Auto-completion
Editing in the text view can easily result in unbalanced brackets, elements that are not closed properly, or other violations of the well-formedness principle.

XML Spy automatically completes elements as well as inserting all required attributes as soon as you finish entering the element name on your keyboard. The cursor is automatically positioned between the start and end tags of the element, so that you can immediately continue to add child elements or contents:

Use the Check well-formedness command at any time 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 also use the mouse during editing in the Text View. If you select 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 view 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 for your web application.

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