Visual XPath 0.3

A while back, I made some changes to the Visual XPath tool but didn't get any time to upload it. Now, you can find the tool's description on it's own page and ofcourse you can also download it from here.

To revise the purpose of this tool, here is a little description.

“Visual XPath is a graphical way of generating XPath query results. It can also be used to generate XPath queries dynamically by select XML nodes shown in the form of Tree. You can also generate queries for individual attributes.“

Although that is just a basic description but you would find much more in the utility.

Changes made in this version:
- Support for Verbose output (in addition to abbreviated output)
- Open file from Command Line
- Drag/Drop Xml files from Windows Explorer
- Support for group queries in context menu
- Show queries in the XPath Query Textbox instead of statusbar. Therefore the "Use Selected XPath" button is disabled because of the above feature.

And now you can also integrate with VS.NET by the following steps:

Step 1: Add to the External Tools

Goto Tools->External Tools
Add Visual XPath: Put $(ItemPath) in the Arguments text box

Step 2: Map a shortcut key to this external tool

Goto Tools->Customize
Press the Keyboard button and then write "Tools.ExternalCommand(n)" in the Show command containing text box, where n is the sequence of the Visual XPath tool. You can get this number by selecting the Tools window and counting the external tools upto Visual XPath.
The assign some shortcut key for this tools. I preferred Ctrl+Shirt+X, which is also available to use.

5 Comments

  • Nice work. I had a very simple tool to do XPath queries previously and this is a much better way of doing it. We had some very large financial XML documents and navigating to the link and having the XPath statement there and ready to copy is great. Wouldn't mind if you got rid of the msg boxes popping up tho and placed the 'TODO's in the Help menu option or something.



    Would be interested in the next versions.

    glav@aspalliance.com



    Well done.

  • I saw Scott Watermasysk's post on your nice utility. If you're interested in seing a different approach to illustrating XPath query results, have a look at my website. I'm highlighting the hits directly in the XML.



  • Thank's for this realy useful tool Nauman!

    I have spread the word about this application to my coworkers.



    I agree with Emil. A nice feature to Visual XPath would be if the node matching an expresseion was highlighted

  • Yes, there are two approaches to see the result. The first one is to highlight the matching nodes and the other is what I have taken. I selected the latter approach based on my own requirements because I wanted to see the results only.

  • There seems to be a problem with XML docs that have multiple namespaces.



    I used an RSS xml file as a test, and Visual XPath included "def:" for the default namespace for each node that was in the default. However, executing the query resuls in no matches. But if I simply remove "def" from the XPath everyhing works fine.

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