Portable XPath Visualizer

Made as the portable counterpart of XPath Visualizer, this is a straightforward tool made to help you view open and view .xml files, make some modifications, as well as perform XPath queries.

Apart from .NET Framework, you don't have to run any other installations. You can just drop the program files in a custom location on the disk and click the .exe file to launch it, or save it to a pen drive to directly run it on any PC.

XPath Visualizer comes packed in an ultra-simplistic interface that doesn't have many options. Firstly, you have to press the Alt key to make the menu bar visible, after which you can load an .xml file using the file browser (drag-and-drop is unsupported), or get an HTTP URL.

The document's contents are made visible in the main window, so you can explore each line of code, edit it, and save the changes to a new file or overwrite the current one. Multiple tabs are supported, so you can open multiple .xml docs at once to easily toggle them. Plus, you can insert as many new namespaces and prefixes as you want.

The app shows line numbers and supports XML syntax highlighting. In order to evaluate an XPath expression, all you have to do is type it in the dedicated box, as the program automatically highlights the node that it refers to in real time.

During this time, you can consult the status bar to check the accuracy of an expression as well as actions taken by the tool. If there are multiple occurrences of the given expression, then you can jump to the next one by clicking an arrow symbol.

XPath Visualizer implements options for reindenting the XML code while preserving whitespace, hiding the line number, stripping namespaces, extracting or removing highlighted nodes (all occurrences), as well as copying data to the Clipboard.

The only inconvenience to XPath Visualizer is that, if you're not familiarized with the tool, you might be fooled into thinking that it's missing some features because the menu bar is not shown by default. On top of that, it doesn't integrate an option for keeping it visible, so you have to press "Alt" every time. Luckily, keyboard shortcuts are supported to help you speed up some operations.

As expected, CPU and RAM consumption was minimal. The program executes queries swiftly and includes help documentation for inexperienced users. Although it's rather simplistic, XPath Visualizer provides a simple and effective method for exploring XML files and performing queries.