The "Line Based Editing" tab allows to view and edit huge multi gigabyte XML files in XMLSpy®. In combination with the SAX based well-formed check and validation you will benefit of a new quality on working with your huge XML instance documents.

On opening a file for Line Based Editing the original file is copied. No changes are made directly to the original file until you use the Commit command. This way you can check the changes with a suitable tool before commiting the modifications to the original file.

One can also use the Line Based Editing tab to extract and create new XML documents from an existing huge file.

Copy text from the file content easily with CTRL+C from the Line Based Editing view to the clipboard and paste it anywhere you like. The Line Based Editing view itself is read-only, therefore paste and cut operations are not supported here.

Using the Line Numbers control

The Line Numbers control is used to navigate through the file content and to select one or multiple lines for modification. To select a single line click the line number with the left mouse button. You select an additional line below by holding down SHIFT and pressing the cursor DOWN key. You can deselect a line by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing the cursor UP key. To select a range of lines quickly just hold down the SHIFT key and press the left mouse button at the last line of the range.

For navigation in the file content you can always use the scroller. You won't notice any delay on browsing through the lines even for a multi million lines document. Sometimes it is necessary to jump directly to a certain line number. In this case set the focus to the Line Numbers control by clicking anywhere in it. Then simply type the line number using the number pad. After you stopped typing the window will jump to the number you specified.

The Commands

• Open Use the Open button to open a file for Line Based editing. A standard File Dialog appears where you can select the file. The currently supported encodings are UTF-8 and UTF-16. You can open XML files and plain text files with a BOM. Line Based Editing needs to find the line breaks in the whole file. Therefore it can take a while until the file content will appear in the window. A 100 MB file should be processed in about 3 seconds.

• Edit lines Select some lines in the Line Numbers control on the left side to enable the "Edit lines" button. After pressing the Edit button a new document is created in XMLSpy® which contains the content of the selected lines from the XML file. File Commander PRO remembers that this document is associated with the file currently open for Line Based Editing.

• Delete lines Lines can be quickly deleted with this button. This command is enabled if one or more lines are selected and no lines are currently edited in an XMLSpy® document.

• Save The Save command updates the currently for editing selected lines with the content of the XMLSpy® document which was previously created by the "Edit lines" command. The updated lines will appear as soon as the new content is written to the working copy of the original file. It is not necessary that the number of lines in the XMLSpy® document matches the number of selected lines in the huge file opened for Line Based Editing. This means the file content can be extended with new additional lines and also reduced if the number of current lines in the document is less then the number of selected lines in the huge file.

• Commit The Commit command copies the working file over the original file. At this time you are overwritting the source file. Actually there is no need to commit all changes to the original document. If you want to keep the source file just locate the working file in the directory of the original file and rename it. The working file has always the same name as the original one with "_FCPR" added to the end.

•  Goto Opens a dialog to where you can enter a line number to jump. CTRL+G also opens this dialog.

•  Find... To quickly find certain strings within the document use the Find dialog.
  
  

  Simply type the search string into the "Find what" field and click the Find button. Use the F3 key to find the next occurance.

•  Well-formed Check if the XML structure is still well-formed. It is recommended to keep any XML document well-formed before you commit your changes.

•  Validate Validates the file if a schema is assigned. The result window appears below the file content view in the same way as you know it from the "XML ValidatorBuddy" tool. A 100 MB document is usually validated in a few seconds (depends also on the complexity).