This is just informational — a little bit of a heads up as I finish working this out. Essentially, what I’m doing it building a preview mode into the MarcEditor. The assumption here is that if you have a file over a certain size (by default, 1 MB) — the MarcEditor will default loading the file into a preview mode. Exactly what is a preview mode and how will affect your use of the MarcEditor? This is a great question and why I’m excited about this new feature. When using the global editing features, MarcEdit actually saves the data from the Editor and then handles the info outside of the Editor — and then reloads the results back into the editor. In general, file loading actually incures a pretty stiff penalty — for example, a 150 MB file takes approximately 30 seconds to load. What the preview mode then does is:
1) Allows the user to see the first 1 MB of the file
2) still use all the global editing functions without incuring the file loading penalty.
3) see results of modifications — without having to scroll through the entire file.
4) Removes memory and file size as a limitation. Currently, the theoretical file limit to the MarcEditor is 2GBs — the Windows Paging size. However, the realistic file limit is closer to 200 MB because of available physical and virtual memory. By having a preview mode, these limits are removed since the editing tools themselves have no file size limit and the actual data loaded will be no more than 1 MB.
If you want to see the entire file — no problem. There is a link in preview dialog that allows you to override the preview behavior and load the entire file.
I think that this is a good idea — at least — I know that my personal useage of the MarcEditor will increase once this has been added since I work with large files and this will elimate the file loading penalties. And from my conversations with folks, I think others will find this very useful as well.
Anyway, I wanted to give folks an idea of what this will look like just so its not a surprise when it shows up in the next build or so. Here’s a screenshot — the preview note is below the menu.
If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.
–Terry