XML Editing With Eclipse

XML Editing With Eclipse

Elliotte Rusty Harold

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

elharo@metalab.unc.edu

http://www.cafeconleche.org/

Out of the Box

• The Plug-In samples include a basic XML editor:

• To build:

  1. File/New/Project

  2. Plug-in Development/Plug-in Project.

  3. XEdit for Name

  4. Default values for Plug-in Project Structure.

  5. Create a plug-in project using a code generation wizard and the Plug-in with an editor options.

  6. Next and then the Finish option on the next screen Simple Plug-in Content;

  7. Rebuild All

• Installing:

  1. Use a plug-in wizard to export it as a tar.gz file

  2. Untar the file (in the eclipse directory) and copy the result to the plugins directory

  3. Restart Eclipse

• After all that, it's a plain text editor with syntax coloring

Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP) Project

• Divided into Web Standard Tools and J2EE Standard Tools

• Web Standard Tools subproject supports XML Web Services including HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, WSDL, SOAP, UDDI, and SQL

• J2EE Standard Tools supports JAX-RPC, JSR-109, servlets, Java Server Pages, EJB, JAX-RPC, JDBC, and JAXP

Tools Include

• WSDL and W3C Schema Editor

• Web Service Explorer

• Web Service Wizard

• WS-I Test Tools

• J2EE Explorer

• JAX-RPC

• JSR 109

• Axis 1.0

Requires

• Eclipse 3.1

• Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF)

• Graphical Editing Framework (GEF)

• Java EMF Model Runtime

• Install by unzipping into your eclipse directory, or copy all the features and plugins directories into the eclipse directory

• Or just use the update manager

XML Editor

• Kicks in automatically when you open an XML document in Eclipse (once installed)

• Graphical tree editing mode (Flaky)

• Syntax colored source editing mode (not too bad)

XML Workflow

• Define use cases

• Hand author sample documents

• Write DTD/XSD/RNG (optional!)

• Write software to process the documents: XSL, Java, Database, etc.

Sample Use Case: Day List

• Observers

• Date

• Species:

  • Name

  • Number

  • Location

  • Notes

  • Observers

  • Certainty

• Location

Sample Data

Let's put this into Eclipse

Demo!

• New Other-->XML/XML

• </ autocloses tag

• No quickfixes

• Auto-complete using previously used tags

• DTD editing is pretty much plain-text only

Creating a DTD

• Validate Using Context Menu/Validate XML File

• Validation is somewhat broken; validates against element declarations; not entire document

• Validates undeclared elements

• Need to "validate" the DTD; syntax errors are not detected automatically

Creating a XSD

1. Format Document

2. Hmm, what about namespaces?

3. elementFormDefault="qualified"

4. Add an element declaration:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <schema xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
   	targetNamespace="http://namespaces.cafeconleche.org/birds/"
   	xmlns:tns="http://namespaces.cafeconleche.org/birds/"
   	elementFormDefault="qualified">
   	
   	<element name="daylist">
   	  <complexType>
   		<sequence>
   		
   		</sequence>
   	  </complexType>
   	</element>
   	
   	
   </schema>

5. Unlike DTDs errors are noted dynamically

6. Set document to validate against schema (comment out DOCTYPE and notice how "too smart" the comment autocomplete is):

   xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
            xsi:schemaLocation="http://namespaces.cafeconleche.org/birds/ daylist.xsd"

Finishing the XSD

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsd:schema xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
	targetNamespace="http://namespaces.cafeconleche.org/birds/"
	xmlns="http://namespaces.cafeconleche.org/birds/"
	elementFormDefault="qualified">

	<xsd:element name="daylist">
		<xsd:complexType>
			<xsd:sequence>
				<xsd:element name="site">
					<xsd:complexType>
						<xsd:complexContent mixed="true">
							<xsd:restriction base="xsd:anyType">
								<xsd:attribute name="id" type="xsd:ID" />
							</xsd:restriction>
						</xsd:complexContent>
					</xsd:complexType>
				</xsd:element>
				<xsd:element name="date" type="xsd:string" />
				<xsd:element name="observers">
					<xsd:complexType>
						<xsd:sequence>
							<xsd:element name="observer" type="xsd:string"
								minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
						</xsd:sequence>
					</xsd:complexType>
				</xsd:element>
				<xsd:element name="species" type="SpeciesType" minOccurs="1" maxOccurs="unbounded" />
			</xsd:sequence>
		</xsd:complexType>
	</xsd:element>

	<xsd:complexType name="SpeciesType" mixed="true">
		<xsd:sequence>
			<xsd:element name="location" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" />
			<xsd:element name="time" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" />
			<xsd:element name="note" type="xsd:string" minOccurs="0" />
		</xsd:sequence>
	</xsd:complexType>

</xsd:schema>

More Specific Types

In graph view

• Change time type to xsd:time

• Change multiplicity; Allow multiple sites

• Change date to regex pattern \d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d

????

Creating a RNG

No support; can edit like anything else

XML Wizard

• Creates Files from DTD/Schema

• Demo

Creating Documents from a Schema

• W3C XML Schema Language is supported

• Schemas are more descriptive than DTDs so more content can be automatically generated

Processing XSLT/Java/C++/etc.

• No built in support as such

• Can use usual XML editor for XSLT

• Can use usual Java editor for Java code

XML Menu

• Expand All/Collapse All in Graphical View

• Grammar Constraints

• Reload Dependencies

WSDL/Schema Editor Features

• Graphical editing mode (not too flaky)

• Source editing mode (basically same as XML)

• Binding Wizard

• Validator

s

Web Services Explorer

• Search UDDI Registries

• Navigate Web Services Inspection Language (WSIL) Documents

• Import WSDL into development project

• Dynamic invocation based on WSDL

• View SOAP messages

• Publish WSDL into UDDI Registries

Web Services Wizard

• Generate/deploy/test/publish

• Configure project, server, and SOAP engine

• SOAP Code generators

• WSDL to client proxy

• WSDL to server skeleton

• Java to WSDL

• JSP test client

Test Tools

• WSDL 1.1 Validator

• SOAP 1.1 Message Monitor/Analyzer

Plugins

• Over 40 different XML plugins for Eclipse

• Payware, open source, etc.

• Some for specific formats like VoiceXML

• Some for specific tools like schema validation

• Some generic editors

General Purpose Editors

• Orbeon Studio

• Oxygen http://www.oxygenxml.com/

• JAPISoft's http://www.japisoft.com/exslt/

• XMLAuthor http://www.svcdelivery.com/xmlauthor/

• XMLBuddy http://www.xmlbuddy.com/ (Pro and free versions)

• Compound XML Document Editor http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/cxde

Special Purpose Plugins

• Improve XSLT Plugin for Eclipse (broken? Deregisters WebTools)

• Orangevolt XSLT Plugin for Eclipse

• FOPBridge http://www.ahmadsoft.org/fopbridge.html

• XSD http://www.eclipse.org/xsd/

• Tiger XSLT Mapper http://www.axizon.com/

Built on top of Eclipse

To Learn More

• This presentation: http://www.cafeconleche.org/slides/eclipseworld2005/xmlediting/

• Eclipse WebTools project: http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/