<oXygen/> XML Editor User Guide

Perspectives

The <oXygen/> interface uses standard interface conventions and components to provide a familiar and intuitive editing environment across all operating systems.

In <oXygen/> you can work with documents in one of the perspectives:

Editor perspective
Editing of documents is supported by specialized and synchronized editors and views.
Debugger perspective
XSLT stylesheets can be debugged by tracing their execution step by step.
Tree Editor perspective
An XML document is viewed and edited as a tree of XML elements.

Editor perspective

The Editor perspective is used for editing the content of your documents. The space is organized in:

Figure 3.1. Editor perspective

Editor perspective

When two or more panels are displayed, <oXygen/> provides divider bars. By selecting a divider bar, it can be dragged to a new position, therefore increasing the space occupied by one panel while decreasing it for the other.

As majority of the work process centers around the Editor panel, other panels can be hidden from view using the expand and collapse controls located on the divider bars.

This perspective organizes the workspace in the following panels:

Main menu
Provides menu driven access to all the features and functions available within <oXygen/>.
Main toolbar
Provides easy access to common and frequently used functions. Each icon is a button that acts as a shortcut to a related function.
Editor panel
The place where you spend most of your time, reading, editing, applying markup and checking the validity and form of your documents.
Outliner panel
Provides the following functions: XML document overview, modification follow-up, document structure change, document tag selection.
Model view panel
Presents the structure of the current edited tag and additional tag documentation.
Message panel
Displays messages returned from user operations.
Project panel
Enables the definition of projects and logical management of the documents it contains.

Debugger perspective

The Debugger perspective is used for detecting problems in a XSLT transformation process by executing the process step by step in a controlled environment and inspecting the informations provided in different special views. The workspace is organized in:

Figure 3.2. Debugger perspective

Debugger perspective
  • Source document view - Displays and allows editing of data or document oriented XML files (documents).
  • Stylesheet document view - Displays and allows editing of XSL files(stylesheets).
  • Output document view - Displays the transformed output that results from the input of a selected document (XML) and selected stylesheet (XSL) to the transformer. The result of transformation is dynamically written as the transformation is processed. There are two views for the output: a text view (with XML syntax highlight) and an XHTML view.
  • Control toolbar - Contains all actions needed in order to configure and control the debug process.
  • Information views - Distributed in two panes that are used to display various types of information that can be used to understand the transformation process. For each information type there is a corresponding tab. While running a transformation, relevant events are displayed in the various information views. This enables the developer to obtain a clear view of the transformation progress.

Tree Editor perspective

The Tree Editor perspective is used for editing the content of a document viewed as a XML tree. The workspace is organized in:

Figure 3.3. Tree Editor perspective

Tree Editor perspective
  • Main menu - provides menu driven access to all the features and functions available in <oXygen/> Tree Editor perspective.
  • Toolbar - provides easy access to common and frequently used functions. Each icon is a button that acts as a shortcut to a related function.
  • Editor panel - easy editing of structured mark-up documents. Each token has associated an icon for a easy visual identification of the tokens.
  • Message panel - display messages returned from user operations.
  • Model panel - show the detailed information about the attribute or element that you are working on.
  • Entities panel - present a list of defined entities that you can insert within your document.
  • All Elements panel - present a list of all defined elements that you can insert within your document.