In the grid editor the XML document is displayed as a structured grid of nested tables in which the text content can be modified by non technical users without editing directly the XML tags. The tables can be expanded and collapsed with a mouse click to show or hide the elements of the document as needed. Also the document structure can be changed easily with drag and drop operations on the grid components.
You can switch between the text tab and the grid tab of the editor panel with the two buttons Text and Grid available at the bottom of the editor panel. Also the switch can be performed with the actions and
If the edited document is associated with a schema (DTD, XML Schema, Relax NG, etc.), the editor offers content completion popups for the element and attributes names and values. If you choose to insert an element that has required content, it will be inserted automatically including the subtree of needed elements and attributes.
To display the content completion popup you have to start editing, for example by duble clicking the cell. When editing, pressing CTRL SPACE redisplays the popup.
The grid editor has two modes for the layout. The default one is the "grid" layout. This smart layout of the grid editor detects the recurring elements in the XML document and creates tables having as columns the children (including the attributes) of these elements. In this way it is possible to have tables nested in other tables, reflecting the structure of your document.
The other layout mode is "tree"-like. This layout does not create any table, it presents the structure of the document directly.
You can switch between the two modes using the contextual menu: