Getting Familiar with the Interface
Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin includes several perspectives and editing modes to help you accomplish a wide range of tasks. Each perspective and editing mode also includes a large variety of helper views, menu actions, toolbars, and contextual menu functions.
Regardless of the perspective or editing mode that
you are working with, the default layout consists of the following areas:
- Menus
- Menu-driven access to all the features and functions available in Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin. Most of the menus are common for all types of documents, but Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin also includes some context-sensitive and framework-specific menus and actions that are only available for a specific context or type of document.
- Toolbars
- Easy access to common and frequently used functions. Each icon is a button that acts as a shortcut to a related function. Some of the toolbars are common for all perspectives, editing modes, and types of documents, while others are specific to the particular perspective or mode. Some toolbars are also framework-specific, depending on the type of document that is being edited.
- Helper Views
- Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin includes a large variety of dockable views to assist you with editing, viewing, searching, validating, transforming, and organizing your documents. Many of the views also contain useful contextual menu actions, toolbar buttons, or menus. The most commonly used views for each perspective and editing mode are displayed by default and you can choose to display others to suit your specific needs.
- Editor Pane
- The main editing area in the center of the application. Each editing mode provides a main editor pane where you spend most of your time reading, editing, applying markup, and validating your documents. The editor pane in each editing mode also includes various contextual menu actions and other features to help streamline your editing tasks. Each file that has been opened has a tab at the top of the editing pane.
- Perspectives
- Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin includes several different perspectives that you can use to work with your documents. The Oxygen XML perspective is the most commonly used perspective used for displaying and editing the content of your XML documents, and it is the default perspective when you start Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin for the first time. Oxygen XML Developer Eclipse plugin also includes a Database perspective that allows you to manage databases and their connections and a few debugging perspectives that allow you to detect problems in XSLT or XQuery transformations.