I had a need for a client services teammate to get their hands dirty with some XML. In this project, an XML file defines the hierarchy of pages in a web site. With a massive redesign under way, the team needed someone with familiarity of the existing pages to make the changes. With the hopes of giving my non-developer teammate a slick application to help them rearrange some angle brackets, I took a look at Xml Notepad 2007 and WCMHelp's XmlPad.

Xml Notepad 2007

The bits can be downloaded here and this document a nice explanation of the author's intent.

The left window shows the tree. The red dots are attributes and the folder icons are elements. The right window shows the values of the attributes. There's an XSL tab for viewing transformations. You can point the application at an XSLT file and see the output too.

The part I like the best about this is application is its simplicity. I need my teammate to look at each node and make a determination. They might need to move it anywhere in the hierarchy. There are four buttons on the right side of the toolbar expressly for this purpose. If they feel a little more ambitious, they can click and drag the node to the new location in the left window.

WMHelp XMLPad 3

You can get the bits here. This application feels a little more powerful than the first application. It can create schemas and validate against them in a more flexible manner than XML Notepad.

The attribute names and values appear in the lower left window of this application. There are different views of the XML available too. The picture above shows the source view. There are three other views (Grid, Table and Preview) in the bottom of the right window.

This application doesn't show the simple set of buttons in the toolbar for moving nodes, although they can be dragged around in the tree. I find that dragging can be a little unpredictable with a large node set. With all the on-the-spot decision making going on, I felt that the simple XML Notepad program was better suited for the specific task and user. However, if I'm the one doing XML work, I would probably choose XMLPad if VS.Net 2005 didn't do the trick for some reason.

At some point, I'd like to checkout XMLSpy. I've heard great things about it for years. I chose to examine these two because they were free and this was a one time gig. If I end up doing lots of work with my angle bracket hammer, then I probably will put in a request for the XMLSpy license.