Oxygen XML Forum

Hi guys,

I don't know if there is a way to do this already that I'm not seeing, but if not...

It would be great if you could incorporate some way of maintaining "to-do" lists for code editing tasks, with bookmarks or links to the fragment that has the pending "to-do".

Obviously, this is a feature that a lot of IDE's for programming languages have -- but it's also a big issue for large XML projects...

My first thought is that this could be part of the "Project" menu, i.e. task management could be part of the project framework. Even very simple task management functionality would be incredibly useful.

John

...I just noticed the bookmarks feature. This is a great starting point. Enhancements that would be great to see include the ability to:

- associate a name, some comment text and a priority flag with each bookmark
- show a view pane with the current file's bookmarks by sorted by name or priority, with click-to-select
- associate a bookmark with a span of text, not just a single location
- allow more than 9 bookmarks/file
- show all bookmarks from selected files within a given project in a single pane
- arrange bookmarks in hierarchies to reflect task dependencies

Hi John,

As you know oXygen is available aslo as an Eclipse plugin. In that context we provide support for tasks by automatically createing annotations from TODO markers found in XML comments, like\
Thanks for providing such a detailed description of your request. I will have that recorded on our issue tracking system.

Best Regards,
George

Hi George,

Thanks for adding this to the list. btw, when I say "bookmark a span", I think I should have said "bookmark a DOM branch".

My current workaround for this functionality is that I add an attribute named "xml:todo" to the element I want to mark for further work, and then I put my comment text in the attribute value. (I cheat by hijacking the xml namespace because the parsers are xml-namespace aware and so don't complain about lack of a namespace declaration! )

When I want my selectable to-do list, I issue an xpath search for "//@xml:todo/.. " and voila, up comes a list of my to-do tasks in a click-to-select window.

This is also good because it is fairly insensitive to edits within the document, i.e. I can still find my to-dos even if things have moved around in the document.

John

I got a better idea. I put <!-- TODO --> somewhere within the elements with the problem, then I issue the XPath "//comment()[contains(.,"TODO")]/.."

This works quite nicely.

Hi John,

Yes, that is better.

You should be able to use also the collection function to extend the search over multiple files, for example:

collection('.?select=*.xml;recurse=true')//comment()[contains(., 'TODO:')]

will search in the folder of the current file, recursively in all .xml files.

However, oXygen will have issues to locate comments when the collection function is used. To get near those comments you can select the first from following sibling element, preceding sibling element or parent, with something like:

collection('.?select=*.xml;recurse=true')//comment()[contains(., 'TODO:')]/(following-sibling::*[1],preceding-sibling::*[1],..)[1]

In version 11 there will be also an XPath filter for the search in files operation so you can just perform a search for TODO: restricting the scope to comment().

Best Regards,
George