[oXygen-user] Feedback on oXygen V6 Beta

[Eliot Kimber]

I'm in the middle of a project where we are developing XSLT 2 transforms 
  and using complex XSD schemas, so the new features in V6 were quite 
welcome (we had been using Turbo XML for Schema viewing by oXygen for 
XSLT and schema editing--we get Turbo for free with our licenses of Epic 
Editor).

I like the schema viewer but there are a few things that I think would 
make it more effective to work with (in rough order of priority) (this 
is for the full model view--I haven't fully explored the logical view, 
but it might address some of my comments below):

1. Ability to control collapsing of entire tree, e.g. "collapse 
children/expand children). When you're dealing with a large schema with 
lots of top-level elements and types and you want to focus on just one 
part it's tedious to collapse everything. It would probably help to also 
have the default be to have all the children of the root initially 
collapsed.

Epic Editor's XML tree view has a neat feature that I've never seen 
anywhere else: if you triple click on a tree item it will collapse the 
children of that item--this makes it really quick to collapse a long 
list of children.

2. Option to view just the element/type hierarchy without all the 
details of reference, refinement, extension, etc. As it is, it can be a 
little difficult to navigate down through a hierarchy of element types 
because the tree can get pretty wide, so there's a lot of scrolling, 
especially if you've used long names for types (as I tend to do).

One of the nice things about Turbo's view is that it is pretty quick to 
navigate down the tree.

3. Provide a "where used" view, that is, when you click on an element 
type, show what other element or type contexts it's allowed in, from 
which you can navigate to those types.

4. In the logcal model view, also synchronize with the source, including 
providing the option to open the containing XSD file if it's not already 
open.

Things I really like:

- The list of types, elements, and groups. Very handy for getting a view 
over how the schema is organized from a coding standpoint.

- The synchronization of the tree view with the markup view. Really 
handy. Will save much time now spent doing searches for specific entries 
  in the schema.

- The showing of enumerations for element content.

- For the logical model view, the grouping of types by their namespace.

Cheers,

Eliot
-- 
W. Eliot Kimber
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