Xponent

Text Viewer-editor

A text viewer-editor has been added. It may be used to quickly view any text file in read-only mode, including XML documents. It is used in edit mode when a syntax error is reported during the initial reading and parsing of an XML document. Fixing such errors in prior versions was limited to accessing only the section(s) of the file containing the reported error line(s). By having access to the entire file, users now have an easier time determining the exact nature of the error, particularly when it involves mis-matched start and end tags. The text viewer-editor is virtual in the sense that only a small part of a file is loaded into memory at a given time. The result is that any size file should load in under one second and provide immediate access to any part of the file.

The text viewer-editor is also available in edit mode for an XML document that has already been parsed and displayed in the treeview, as this ensures the XML is well-formed. Text search and replace is available during edit mode.

Entity Handling

Entity handling has been changed so that the edit textboxes contain entity references, while the treeview displays de-referenced, or parsed, entitities. This applies to entities declared in an internal DTD as well as pre-defined entities. For example, the treeview would display the following element
<project>1 < 2</project> while the edit panel would display "1 &lt; 2". This also applies to character references.

XMLMax now uses the SQLite embedded database for indexing and XPATH queries. It reduces indexing time by about twenty percent and slightly improves XPATH performance for some queries.

A Tools menu has been added with three items. One scans an XML document for illegal characters as per the w3c specification. Options are provided for either removing illegal characters or replacing them with a user-defined string. As with most XMLMax features, it uses low level file I/O with a Filestream object which provides very fast performance.

The second Tools menu item converts datetime strings in an XML document to XML DateTime: the ISO 8601 format, which is yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ss.

The last Tools menu item deletes a range of nodes where the user "marks" the start and end nodes of the range and all nodes between and including them are deleted, including all child nodes.

Support for all "backward-looking" axes in XPath 1.0 has been added, including ancestor::, preceding::, etc. This makes XMLMax one of the few XML tools that supports all XPath axes with XML documents too large to fit into memory. Native XML databases also provide this capability. The significance is that for the first time one may use XPath to extract any nodeset from very large XML documents without programming and without a database.

Also added is the ability to save the results nodeset of an XPath query to a file.

XPath 1.0 Enhancements.

Full support for the XPath collection operator has been added. XPath queries in XMLMax will work with large Xml documents, including those that are too large to fit into memory.

XML Splitting

An option has been added for inserting an include file into each of the split files. Also added is an option to skip to a specific element in the source xml before the split operation begins.

Other New Features

Horizontal Scrolling In Tree View
Font Size Control Via Plus-Minus Keys

Faster XPath Queries.

The index used for XPath queries was re-designed to order XML elements by path. This allows the query engine to limit the search to XML elements whose path matches the axes in the XPath expression. The result is significantly faster queries, on the order of two to five fold. Performance is dependent on how many XML elements have the same path as that specified by the XPath expression.

New Methods For Splitting Large XML.

Three new methods for splitting XML documents into smaller files have been added. Splitting XML files with the prior version was limited to using an XPath expression to locate fragments and write each to a separate file. The new methods are:

• Every nth element at a depth of one.
• Upon change of the value of a specified attribute that is in an element at a depth of one.
• Upon change of the name of an element at a depth of one.

All of the split methods write the entire fragment of each matching element to a separate auto-numbered file, with a user-specified name. Options are provided for inserting an XML Declaration and a root element, which may include attributes.