Recently, I posted about my colleague Olivier’s MDS Explorer tool, which is a great way to get a look inside your MDS repository.  I have been playing around with it a little bit, nothing much really, just some cosmetic stuff, but you might like to take a look at it.

I made it format the documents nicely with proper indentation, and with line numbers and a nicer editor.  It also will warn you if you are about to open a large document so that you know it has not crashed, but that you just have to be patient.  And I added some icons and stuff.  There is even a nice Dora the Explorer picture hiding in there for those who care to look for it

Here is an example of looking at a composite (Arrays).  You can see all the files in the composite on the left hand side, and I have a BPMN process open in the editor pane on the right.  This is connected to a database MDS under BPM 11.1.1.6.  It also allows you to connect to a file-based MDS.

Note that you can go ahead and edit the files directly in here and save the changes to MDS – if you are game!

If you want to play with this, you can grab it from my branch in Olivier’s Subversion repository on java.net – it has IDE files for NetBeans 7.2 in that branch.