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I think the XSD-design editor should be redesigned. Have a look at how XMLSpy does it! It's quite intuitive and very comfortable in most cases. (Unfortunatly very expensive, too.) A good graphical view of an XSD is very important, especially if the file is bigger. Maybe this should be realized with the new NetBeans Visual Library.
Do you have some reasons to justify or just want this as a face-lift?
Both: There are so many basic features missing, it's hard to know where to start. And though the tree-view is not that bad, I think the graph-view like in XMLSpy shows the information more clearly. Of course, the missing features are more important than this change in view, but since there are so many features missing and NetBeans has this powerful Visual Library, it might be worth to migrate to the graph-view right from the beginning. I really suggest to have a look at the XMLSpy editor, if you have the chance. There's nothing bad to learn from others. ;-) PS: There are also things in the NetBeans XSD-design editor, which I like better than the way XMLSpy does it eg. the inline attribute-editor. So, of course, there should not be a stupid 1-to-1 copy of XMLSpy. Just get some inspiration. ;-)
XML Schema is not a simple language to begin with. The DV philosophy in NB is completely different from Spy or JDeveloper for that matter. The idea was to allow user to draw the outline of the eventual XML document (for which s/he intends to write a schema) and generate schema code underneath. This is not the same in those tools. They want you to author schemas as though you're an expert in schema language. OTOH, DV doesn't expect you to be an expert. It has been designed for folks who are not experts in Schema language nor want to be expert. If you're an expert, use the column/tree view. And certainly, it can be improved and a lot of things can be added. It certainly has a lot of short-comings. Please share you thoughts on the missing pieces and we'll see what we can do.