It is great that, since XXE 10.2.0, the Find/Replace dialog window now
does not need to be closed between each F/R “session”. However, I have
two issues with the functionality - one related to the dialog window
behavior and one related to its Replace (and Find?) behaviors. The last
issue first:
Issue 1:
Use case situation: I work with modular XHTML documents which embed
subdocuments via XInclude.
I used one such modular document as a template for createing 3 more
modular documents. Of course, when I copy «modular-A» as «modular-B»,
the internal links remain the same - and so I had, as a 2nd and 3rd
step, to change the pointers (href and xpointer attributes) of the
xinclude elements of the new modular documents. Plus I also had to
update the id attributes of the subdocuments, to match the xpointer
attributes of the modular documents.
The Find/Replace dialog is very good for this. However, I ran in to a
surprise when replacing the href and xpointer content of the xindlude
elements.
As example, in my new Chatper10 document, I had to change - inside @href
@xpointer of <xinclude/> the string “C09” to “C10”.
I simply set the F/R dialog to replace any attribute with the string
“C09” to replace that string with “C10”. And then I hit the «Replace
all» button.
But note that before running the F/R dialog command, I de-transcluded
all the content of the document. Thus I was able to work on the
attributes of the xinclude elements (without the de-transclude step,
this would not work, which I guess makes sense).
When I hit the ”Replace all” button, I, for start, believed that
everything worked find. But then I discovered that this only changed the
xpointer attribute. The href attributes was left untouched.
Then I discovered that in order to change the href attributes as well, I
simply at to click the ”Replace all“ button one more time (plus that I
had to run the command upwards instead of downwards).
I find it confusing that the “Replace all“ button did not cause all
occurrences to be replaced.
Issue 2:
The new non-modal Find/Replace dialog window does not work exactly like
other windows. If the window gets in the way, you should not close it,
because then its content goes away. You should rather move the window
out of the way, and activate the window or tab that you want to work
with. This is an issue in and by itself, however this is not what my
report is concerned with.
In my case, I needed to work with 3 files at once. I would in each file
look for the string “C09” and replace it with what was correct for the
current document. This meant that I had to change the Replace string for
each document. But before changing the string, I would typically
activate the new document I was about to work with. To do so, I clicked
the tab I was about to work with. After that I tried to get back to the
Find/Replace window, in order to edit the Replace string. I did so,
again, by clicking the Find/Replace window. However, the field with the
Replace string was impossible to edit. I had to use a shortcut to
circulate through all open windows (of XXE) in order to be able to
activate the Find/Replace window in such a way that the Replace string
field (of ”on Found attributes”) to become editable.
(After that I found another workaround: Rather than activating the Tab
to be edited by clicking inside it, one can simply activate the correct
Tab via the «Show next» menu of the «Tab» menu.)
It is problematic that one has to activate the F/R dialog window in a
particular way, in order to edit it.
Leif Halvard Silli
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