Browsing property lists
PlistEdit Pro allows you to easily examine many property lists at once through its property list browser. There are two ways in which you can create a new browser:
- Select "New Property List Browser" from the Browser menu. This will open a new, empty browser.
- Drag a folder or folders from the Finder onto the PlistEdit Pro application icon. This will open up a new browser and display the property lists found in the folder(s). Note that you can drag an application or any other bundle onto PlistEdit Pro to examine the property lists contained inside.
Once the browser is open, it will display the list of property list files you've added to it. To add more files to an open browser, simply drag the files or folders from the Finder into the browser's list. To open a file shown in the list, just double click on its row in the list, or select one or more files and press the Return key.
Columns
Along with the file's name, you can also see a number of each file's attributes in the other columns in the table. To customize which of these columns are visible, use the pop-up menu by clicking on the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the list. You can also sort the list by one of these properties by clicking on the header of that column (click a second time to reverse the sort order).
The following columns are available:
- Creation date: the file's creation date
- Modification date: the file's modification date
- Size: the size in bytes of the file on disk
- Parent: the name of the parent folder of the file. If more than one file in the last has both the same name and same parent folder name, the enclosing folders will also be shown as necessary to be able to identify the files uniquely.
- Format: the format of the property list, either binary, ASCII, or XML. Note that even though a file's format may be identified here, it does not necessarily mean that the property list is valid.
- Valid: shows whether or not the property list is valid (well formed). To test property list validity, use the Validate command available in the Browser menu. A property list will have a question mark displayed in this column until it has been tested for validity
Converting Formats
You can convert batches of property list files to a different format by selecting the files and using the Change Format submenu available in the Operations menu, or through control-clicking on the file(s).
Searching
If you have a large number of files in a browser, you can use the browser's search features to narrow down the list and easily find the particular file you're looking for. Type something into the search field at the bottom of the window, and PlistEdit Pro will search the list of files for ones matching what you've typed. You can search in one of two ways, either by the file's name, or by its content, chosen by clicking one of the radio buttons just below the search field.
When searching by content, the search will open up all the property list files in the list and look for the given text within the content of the property list. Clicking the "Options..." button will display several ways to customize how it performs the search:
- Search Scope: this allows you to limit the search to either the keys in the property list or the values, or you can search both at once
- Top level only: if this box is checked, the search will only check the items contained by the root of the property list; otherwise, it will search recursively down into all the items in the property list. Recursive searching can be significantly slower, especially for large property lists, so checking this box will often speed up your search times.
- Ignore case: If checked, the browser will perform a case insensitive search
- Invert found file set: If this box is checked, then instead of displaying all the files that do match the search, it will instead show the files that don't match. This can be useful when trying to find a file that's missing a particular key or value.
- Search kind: The pop-up menu will let you select the context to search for the text in. You can choose whether to only show files where the search text is found at the start of a key/value, at its end, anywhere inside the key/value, or only when exactly equal to it.
Clicking the "Save As Default" button will save the current search options as the default ones to be used whenever a new browser is created.
See also: