Large File Viewer

XML files tend to become larger and larger mostly because they are frequently used as a format for database export or for porting between different database formats. Traditional XML text editors simply cannot handle opening these huge export files, some having sizes exceeding one giba byte, because of the necessity that all the file content must be loaded in memory before the user can actually view it.

The best performance of the viewer is obtained for encodings that use a fixed number of bytes per character, like UTF-16 or ASCII. The performance for UTF-8 is very good for documents that use mostly characters of the European languages. For the same encoding the rendering performance is high for files consisting of short lines (up to few thousands characters ) and may degrade for long lines.

The powerful Large File Viewer is available from the Tools menu or as a standalone application. You can also right click a file in your project and choose to open it with the viewer. It uses an efficient structure for indexing the opened document. No information from the file is stored in the main memory, just a list of indexes in the file. In this way the viewer is capable of opening very large files, up to two giga bytes. If the opened file is XML, the encoding used to display the text is detected from the XML prolog of the file. In case of other files, the encoding is taken from the oXygen options. See Encoding for non XML files

 

Figure 4.103. The Large File Viewer

The Large File Viewer

Large File Viewer components:

[Warning]Warning

For faster computation the Large File Viewer uses a fixed font (plain, monospaced of size 12) for displaying characters. The font is not configurable from the <oXygen/> Preferences.

[Tip]Tip

The best performance of the viewer is accomplished for encodings that use a fixed number of bytes per character, like UTF-16 or ASCII. The performance for UTF-8 is very good for documents that use mostly characters of the European languages. For the same encoding the rendering performance is high for files consisting of short lines (Up to a few thowsand characters) and may degrade for long lines.