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Introduction
JSON is today’s preferred structured format to exchange information, especially in the web field. Yet, XML is still a strong player in the field. The possibilities of defining the structure of a XML document with a XML Schema is much more sophisticated and more powerful. So it will be likely you will have to get in touch with XML sooner or later. So this tip will save you some time and money in the future.
While digging into some technical standards which dealt a lot with XML, we had to understand their provided XML Schema. Having just die corresponding XSD File does not help, when you have some more complex structures to deal with. So some visualization will help here.
Support for XML Schema Visualization is lacking ?
Coming from a developers perspective in the Java ecosystem our preferred IDE is IntelliJ from Jetbrains (https://www.jetbrains.com/de-de/idea/). Surprisingly more sophisticated XML support like visualizing XSD ist not part of the base package. There is payware plugin available, but we want to look for some free available alternatives. Looking into the domain of Visual Studio Code (https://code.visualstudio.com) lead to the same solution and a commercial plugin has to be used.
Eclipse To The Rescue
But there is an old friend to the rescue. A long time ago Eclipse was the common IDE for developers in the Java world. Eclipse (https://www.eclipse.org) is still alive and kicking. Furthermore it does support XML und XSD Support for free. To allow the XML and XSD support you have to install the free XML package from the Eclipse marketplace (https://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/eclipse-xml-editors-and-tools).
Now you can thoroughly explore your complex XSD files. It is much more convenient to explore them visually.
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So I hope this little tip come handy and remember good old friends don’t let you down Image may be NSFW.
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