On Mar 2, 12:34 pm, Joseph Kesselman <keshlam-nos...@comcast.net>
wrote:
> I'm not familiar with the "data grid view", so I have no comments on
> whether there's anything precisely equivalent. There are a lot of of
> portable XML editors, including several which happily plug into or work
> smoothly with Eclipse (which is in some sense the portable equivalent of
> Visual Studio)... but I tend to either edit my XML entirely manually (eg
> with Emacs XML mode) or entirely programmatically, so I haven't had
> reason to go looking for compromises between those extremes.
>
> Generating a schema from an XML file... "That trick rarely works". It's
> certainly possible to automatically generate ONE OF the possible schemas
> which describes a document, but that will generally be over-specific in
> some areas and under-specific in others. There are tools which will take
> a collection of XML files and attempt to derive a common schema that
> covers the whole set, but success still tends to be limited; at best you
> may get something that's close enough that it's worth using as a basis
> for manually taking it the rest of the way.
>
> Designing the schema first, then using it to guide creation of instance
> documents, is the ideal approach. If you aren't ready to do that...
> maybe you should be sticking with well-formed documents until the design
> settles down?

Yeah, I was not too impressed with the schema generated by Microsoft
Visual Studio either, but the concept intrigued me and does provide a
foundation to start from - especially if one hand wrote an XML
document.

I will into Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org/) and Conglomerate (http://
www.conglomerate.org/intro.html), it looks like either or both may
satisfy this requirement.  Heck, maybe "emacs" would work, but I am
not familiar with its abilities, it sounds text based, maybe like an
ISPF mainframe editor but with added features could support entering
of data in XML nodes....

Thanks for the pointers,
Scott M.


Here are some links to pics that kind of depict what I was talking
about....

Using the XML and Schema Designers
http://www.samspublishing.com/library/content.asp?b=Net_2003_21days&seqNum=136&rl=1
http://www.samspublishing.com/content/images/bok_0672324210/elementLinks/12fig04.jpg
http://www.samspublishing.com/content/images/bok_0672324210/elementLinks/12fig08.jpg
http://www.samspublishing.com/content/images/bok_0672324210/elementLinks/12fig11.jpg