As mentioned in one of our previous posts, we’ve been working on a port of our SyntaxEditor Web Languages Add-on from WinForms to the WPF version of SyntaxEditor. We’re finishing up some last features on it before it will be ready to launch alongside WPF Studio 2010.2 in the coming weeks.
The advanced XML syntax language implementation in the add-on allows you to specify XML schemas to use for validation and to drive automated IntelliPrompt for the end user. In the previous post on the subject we showed how to create an XHTML editor in a few lines of code with automated IntelliPrompt popups.
One feature we just implemented was the ability to properly support xs:any nodes defined in the XML schemas. xs:any allows a schema to indicate that elements from any, other, or specific namespaces can be included as content within another element.
Best of all, we ported this new functionality back to the WinForms Web Languages Add-on too!
Let’s see an example…
Here is the WPF SyntaxEditor showing an XSLT document loaded. The XSLT is doing a transform to HTML. In the screenshot the mouse is over the xsl:value-of element, showing a quick info tip. Now let’s start typing a new start tag…
The completion list is matching the xsl:apply-templates element and is showing a description tip for it. This functionality wasn’t available in the WinForms version of the add-on in the past since there were HTML tags between the caret location and the parent xsl:template, and the IntelliPrompt didn’t previously know how to handle the scenario.
Now the automated IntelliPrompt does properly handle xs:any specifications in XML schemas. Here’s how the WinForms SyntaxEditor looks editing an XSLT file:
This new functionality will be included in the next SyntaxEditor for WinForms maintenance release. And it will be demoed in the WPF Studio 2010.2 release in the coming weeks.