Entering Data in Text View

Text View is ideal for editing the actual data and markup of XML files because of its DTD/XML Schema-related intelligent editing features.

In addition, Text View provides a number of structural editing features that make editing large sections of text easy. Among these latter features are the following, which can be toggled on and off by clicking the appropriate icon.

The screenshot below shows the current XML file in Text View with all structural editing features enabled. For the sake of clarity, none of the line numbers, indentation guides, etc, will be shown in Text View in rest of this tutorial. Please see the User Manual for more information on Text View.

In this section, you will enter and edit data in Text View in order to become familiar with the features of Text View.

1.	Select the menu item View \| Text view, or click on the Text tab. You now see the XML document in its text form, with syntax coloring.

2.	Place the text cursor after the end tag of the Address element, and press Enter to add a new line.

3.	Enter the less-than angular bracket < at this position. A dropdown list of all elements allowed at that point (according to the schema) is displayed. Since only the Person element is allowed at this point, it will be the only element displayed in the list.

4.	Select the Person entry. The Person element, as well as its attribute Manager, are inserted, with the cursor inside the value-field of the Manager attribute.

Move the cursor to the end of the line (using the End key if you like), and press the space bar. This opens a dropdown list, this time containing a list of attributes allowed at that point. Also, in the Attributes Entry Helper, the available attributes are listed in red. The Manager attribute is grayed out because it has already been used.

7.	Select Degree with the Down arrow key, and press Enter. This opens another list box, from which you can select one of the predefined enumerations (BA, MA, or PhD).

8.	Select BA with the Down arrow key and confirm with Enter. Then move the cursor to the end of the line (with the End key), and press the space bar. Manager and Degree are now grayed out in the Attributes Entry Helper.

11.	Move the cursor to the end of the line (with the End key), and enter the greater-than angular bracket >. XMLSpy automatically inserts all the required child elements of Person. (Note that the optional Title element is not inserted.) Each element has start and end tags but no content.

You could now enter the Person data in Text View, but let's move to Grid View to see the flexibility of moving between views when editing a document.

To switch to Grid View, select the menu item View | Enhanced Grid View, or click the Grid tab. The newly added child elements of Person are highlighted.

Now let us validate the document and correct any errors that the validation finds.