XML tools - overview

This product provides a comprehensive visual Extensible Markup Language (XML) development environment. The tool set includes components for building DTDs, XML schemas, XML, and XSL files.

The following XML tools are available. Before you can use any of the XML tools, you must enable the XML development capabilities. To do so, click Window > Preferences > General > Capabilities, then select the XML Developer check box.

Table 1. XML tools
XML tool Description
XML editor Used for creating and viewing Extensible Markup Language (XML) files. You can use it to create new, empty XML files, or generate them from existing DTDs or existing XML schemas. You can also use it to edit XML files, associate them with DTDs or schemas, and validate them.
DTD Editor Used for creating and viewing Document Type Definitions (DTDs). Using the DTD editor, you can create DTDs, and generate XML schema files.
XML schema editor Used for is a tool for creating, viewing, and validating XML schemas. You can use the XML schema editor to perform tasks such as creating XML schema components, importing and viewing XML schemas, generating relational table definitions from XML schemas, and generating Java beans for creating XML instances of an XML schema.
XSL editor Used to create new Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) files or to edit existing ones. You can use content assist and various wizards to help you create or edit the XSL file. Once you have finished editing your file, you can also validate it. As well, you can associate an XML instance file with the XSL source file you are editing and use that to provide guided editing when defining constructions such as an XPath expression
XSL compiler Used for compiling and integrating XSL 1.0 and 2.0 stylesheet documents into Java projects.
XPath expression wizard Used to create XML Path Language (XPath) expressions. XPath expressions can be used to search through XML documents, extracting information from the nodes (such as an element or attribute).
XML mapping editor Used to map XML-based documents graphically by connecting elements of a source document to elements of a target document. You can extend built-in transformation functions using custom XPath expressions and XSLT templates. The mapping tool automates XSL code generation and produces a deployable transformation document based on the mapping information you provide.

Notes:

Exercise caution when opening large files with any of the XML editors. If the memory limits of the workbench are exceeded, it will abruptly close without saving any data (and without warning or error messages). The number of elements in an XML file, not its size, is the best indicator of how much memory will be required. Memory requirements also depend on what else is open in the workbench - in some cases you can open a fifteen megabytes file, but in other cases a one megabyte file might cause problems. Therefore, we recommend you save all data in the workbench before opening large XML files. This is a permanent restriction.

The behavior of the XML parser when encountering an unresolvable URI (for example, in a DOCTYPE declaration) is to report a fatal IO error and stop any further processing. An unresolved URI is seen neither as a syntactic nor a semantic error and as such, the parser does not attempt to handle it. Essentially, the document remains unchecked. This is a known problem.


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