Graphical User Interface
This page is part of the Getting Started Section. In addition to its standalone console mode, BaseX comes with its own graphical user interface which offers you great tools for managing, querying and visualising your (XML) data.
Contents
Startup
Depending on your operating system, you can launch a GUI instance of BaseX by double-clicking on the BaseX GUI start icon (Windows only) or running the basexgui
script. Additional startup options are listed in the Startup article.
Database Management
The BaseX GUI is a great place for creating and administrating your XML databases.
To create a new database, select Database → New from the menu and browse to an XML document of your choice. You can start with the factbook.xml
document, which contains statistical information on the worlds' countries. It is included in the etc
directory of our full distributions ( ZIP Package and Windows Installer) or can be downloaded here (1.3 MB). In the Create Database dialog, specify the path to your input file and the name of the new database. If you leave the input file field empty, an empty database will be created. Click the OK button to create the database.
Note: You can also use the GUI's editor to create and edit your own XML document. Just specify it as input file for the creation of a new database after saving the document to disk.
To open, rename, copy or drop a database, choose Database → Open & Manage... from the menu. Select one of the available databases on the left-hand side and click on one of the buttons on the right: Open, Rename, Copy or Drop. To open a database, you can also double-click on the database name.
Opening a database activates three more options in the Database menu:
- The Properties item gives you access to a variety of database options and information:
- Add resources and/or set parsing preferences.
- Gain insights into element and attribute names, paths and other information of your XML data.
- Create and manage text, attribute, token and full-text indexes. Set index preferences for language, stemming, case-sensitivity and diacritics or specify a stop word list.
- With the Export item, you can serialize your database into a whole range of different formats, including XML, JSON and csv.
- The Close item closes the database. Currently open databases are closed automatically as soon as another database is opened.
Editor
BaseX's built-in XML editor is a powerful tool for developing full RESTXQ applications. It can be used to write and run XQuery files and modules, edit XML and JSON documents, Command Scripts, and any other text files:
- XQuery, XML and JSON files will be parsed in realtime, and errors will be highlighted.
- XQuery code and command scripts can be executed (via Ctrl Enter, or by clicking on the green triangle).
- Syntax highlighting is available for XQuery, XML, JSON and JavaScript files.
Numerous keyboard shortcuts are available to speed up editing and debugging. Some examples:
- Ctrl H: Search the currently selected string in your complete project.
- Ctrl .: Jump to the next erroneous code in your project.
Template:Mark: If you right-click on an XML document in the Project View, the selected file will be parsed and bound to the context item:
Project View
The Project View is attached to the editor panel. It displays all files of the current project directory in a tree structure. Files can be renamed and deleted by right-clicking on the files. The project directory can be changed as well; the most recent directories will be kept in the history.
All XQuery files in the project directory will be parsed in the background. Buggy XQuery modules, and files importing these modules, will be marked red. With the text fields on top, you can interactively search for file names and contents.
Input Bar
On top of the main window, you can find an input bar. The attached dropdown menu provides three modes: Find, XQuery and Command:
The upcoming example queries can all be used with an instance of the factbook
database:
Find
In the Find mode, the input bar can be used to find single elements and texts in the currently opened database. The following syntax is supported:
Query | Description |
---|---|
city
|
Find elements named city , and texts containing this token.
|
=India
|
Find texts matching the exact string India .
|
~Cing
|
Find texts equal or similar to the token Cingdom .
|
id
|
Find attributes named id and attribute values containing this token.
|
@=f0_119
|
Find attribute values matching the exact string f0_119 .
|
"European Chinese"
|
Find texts containing the phrase "European Chinese" .
|
//city
|
Leading slash: Interpret the input as XPath expression (see below). |
XQuery
In the XQuery mode, XPath and XQuery expressions can be entered in the input bar.
To evaluate the following example queries: enter them in the input bar, and press ENTER or click on the START button:
Query | Description |
---|---|
//country
|
Return all country elements.
|
//country[name = "Switzerland"]
|
Return the country element of "Switzerland".
|
for $city in //city
|
Return the names of all cities with a population larger than one million and order the results by the name of the city. |
Command
In the Command mode, BaseX Commands can be entered and executed. Just try the following examples:
INFO
: Returns system information.CREATE DB TEST
: Creates an empty database named "TEST".LIST
: Lists all databases.
Realtime Options
Via the Options menu, you can change how queries are executed and visualized:
- Realtime Execution: If realtime execution is enabled, your searches and queries will be executed with each key click and the results will be instantly shown.
- Realtime Filtering: If enabled, all visualizations will be limited to the actual results in realtime. If this feature is disabled, the query results are highlighted in the visualizations and can be explicitly filtered with the 'Filter' button.
Visualizations
The BaseX GUI offers various visualizations, which help you to explore your XML data instances from different perspectives:
Result
|
Map
|
Tree
|
Folder
|
Plot
|
Table
|
Explorer
|
Info
|
Look and Feels
By default, the Look and Feel of your operating system will be used in the GUI. In the Preferences dialog, you can choose among some more window themes. The JTattoo library offers some more
look and feels. If you download and copy the JTattoo jar file into the |
Changelog
- Version 9.1
- Added: Project View, set XML document as context.
- Version 8.4
- Added: highlighting of erroneous XQuery modules in the project view.
- Version 8.0
- Updated: support for dark look and feels; support for JTatto library