Morpho User Guide
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Morpho Editor

The metadata editor is used to display and possibly edit all the details of the structured metadata documents used by Morpho. Several examples of editor windows are shown below: Each type of data description document (i.e each metadata type) has some structure which is indicated by the hierarchical outline on the left. Item in the outline are color coded to indicate which items are required and which can be repeated. When an item in this outline is selected, a form based view of the information that is contained in the selected item is shown on the right side of the window. A 'right-click' on any item in the outline displays a popup menu (as shown below) which allows the user various actions. These include duplicating an item, deleting an item, or copy and pasting items. Note that all of these operations include not only the selected item, but also all of the item's 'children' in the indicated hierarchy. Most of the fields on the right side of the editor screen are editable. One can just click on the field of interest and enter text. The 'tab key' will move the selection to the next editable field. Note that non-required fields that are empty will not be saved when changes are made, but will appear again as empty fields when the document is opened again in the editor.   Technical Notes: For those who are interested in technical details, the Morpho editor is an XML editor. It works by first reading an XML file and building an outline (tree) view of the XML document. If the XML document indicates that its structure should follow a certain form by specifying a DTD, then the DTD is scanned and a single instance of any optional nodes not present in the original is added to the hierarchy. Finally, if the editor has addional data about the document type, it will add that data as custom displays or help information about the node, as is shown in the above examples. The editor can thus be customized to display the XML data in a variety of ways.