Summary
SketchPath is foremost an XPath and XML development and analysis tool. The XML editing feature is not the main focus of this tool, but sufficient functionality is provided for convenience, especially for testing XPath expressions against variations in XML.
The XML Editor pane shows a colorized and nesting-level indented view of the raw XML of the opened file.
Most Significant Feature
The ability of the SketchPath XML editor to check XML content in real time against a library of XPath expressions is an extremely powerful feature. For example, an XML document can be easily edited to conform with co-occurrence rules used for quality, security or data integrity purposed. XPath expressions can be used to immediately highlight XML nodes that conflict with the rule set included in the XPath library.
Synchronised Panes
The editor pane is synchronized with the Element Tree and Element Nodes Pane, so that as the cursor moves within the XML editor, the tree-view selection and Sub-Nodes Pane reflect the context of the cursor. In this first production release, the XML can not be modified by changing values within the syncronised panes, only the raw text view.
Editing Features
Continuous 'as-you-type' updating of attribute and text nodes displayed in the Sub-Nodes Pane, the selected node XPath location and the Element Tree. Standard editing features such as Undo, Copy and Paste and text-navigation and selection are provided through the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts.
Word-Wrapping
The default view for the XML is for word-wrapping within the text pane. Word-wrapped lines are still indented to preserve the structured look of the XML. To switch to non-wrapped view, uncheck the 'WordWrap' item on the 'View' menu of the main menu bar.
'Well-Formedness' Checking on Reloading the XML
When changes to the XML text have been completed, click the 'Reload' button on the main toolbar. If the XML is well-formed any cached values in saved session XPath expressions are refreshed as necessary. If the 'well-formedness' check fails the error location is highlighted and an error message displayed.
Encoding
The XML editor supports Unicode. If non ASCII characters are included then, if the XML is saved, the file will be encoded as Unicode (UTF-16) to preserve such characters. Saving as UTF-8 is currently not supported.
Whitespace
To acheive a well-structured view of the XML, all whitespace barring single line feeds is stripped from the XML regardless of any preserve-space attributes. Care should therefore be taken with XPath expressions relying on whitespace within text nodes, the Normalize-Space XPath function is recommended for such cases.
Limitations
Features such as 'as-you-type' colorizing, intellisense and auto-completion are provided within the XPath editor, but not the XML editor.