Introduction
I have read and downloaded many articles and source code from CodeProject, and now I am trying to payback. Recently I had to develop a small and simple XML editor for a data conversion company. We shall discuss the scenario here.
Before I start, I just want to say that I am a new kid in .NET and the contents of this article/source code are not very professional, it is only for beginners. You may have better or simple ways to establish these goals. Anyway I would love to hear from you. I am very much interested in improving my skills. So, if you have any comments, please drop me a mail or post a feedback.
What is an XML Editor?
As far as I know, an XML editor should have all the necessary functionalities of a text editor, plus some extra functionalities like parsing, Intellisense (showing available tags when user types the '<' symbol), output viewing etc.
How?
To fetch available elements and attributes of XML document, we need to read DTD/Schema (Here I am using DTD). Regular Expression is the easiest way to establish this task, just read DTD using StreamReader and extract elements and attributes using Regular Expression and store them in a DataTable.
In XML, we have elements and attributes. What we want is, when a user presses '<' it should pop a list of elements and the selected tag should be inserted at that location. When the user presses '<' and the '/' symbol, the last opened tag should be closed automatically. This can be done by using the Stack class (which provides a simple last-in-first-out collection of objects).
Next we want to format the XML file with proper indentation. Here also I use Regular Expressions to solve the issue. Browse the source code for details, it is almost self-describing. Parsing is the next issue, you can do this by simply importing the XML assembly and using the XmlValidatingReader class.
Happy coding....
