BARfly offers four ways of viewing and editing node data:  Subnode View, Dump View, Text View, and Raw View.  Each view has its own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to displaying certain types of node data; no view is universally better than another.

We encourage you to explore files and try out the various views on individual nodes.  You are only limited by what you can see!

Subnode View is ideally suited for displaying data structures, although you can also use it to display unorganized blocks.  The data display window presents a "sub-tree" control, which describes the individual children of the node currently selected in the node browser.  For data structures, these will be the structure's data members.  For unorganized blocks, these will be the individual simple-type units of the block.

Dump View is suited for displaying nearly any type of data.  Many applications have been built over the years to display binary data in a more text-readable form.  BARfly provides this view to perform dump-on-demand for any type of binary data.  BARfly also performs anti-dump-on-demand, which translates user-edited dumped text back into binary format.

Dump view displays one of two types of dumped data formats in the data display window:  UTD (Universal Text Dump) or XML (eXtensible Markup Language).  UTD gives the user a format similar to initialized data used in programming code, such as in C-based languages and BAR's I.F. script format.  XML is a common format used in characterizing many types of data, and has a variety of uses outside of BARfly.

Text View is ideally suited for displaying text blocks (or any unorganized block known to contain text).  A great number of binary file formats have at least some portions that contain text, and this view presents such text in the data display window with a classic plain-text user interface.  While not very useful for nodes that do not contain data easily interpreted as text, text view provides a very easy mechanism for viewing and editing text data without disrupting surrounding binary data.

Raw View is the classic binary editing interface.  Many individuals have worked with "hex editors," which give the user a parallel user interface for editing binary data (both text and hexadecimal numeric data displayed simultaneously).  This type of interface has never been easy to work with, but sometimes it is the best thing to use for the given situation.

BARfly has a "deluxe" take on the classic binary editing interface:  word size, line size, page size, endian order, and numeric format are all customizable in raw view.  More importantly, you can invoke raw view on demand for any node--not just from the beginning of the file to the end.

You can set preferences as to which of these views you want to display by default for specific types of nodes.  Select Options.Node Data Editing to change preferences.  Also, each of the views has its own custom options for just that view.

If you do not wish to view a particular node with the default view, you can click one of the buttons at the top of the data display window.  This will switch the view accordingly.

NOTE:  If you have made changes to data in a view, attempting to switch to a different view will force you to accept or reject your changes.

Keep in mind that BARfly does not allow organized blocks to be displayed using subnode view or text view .  This is because text is generally not hierarchical in nature, and there is no need for a subnode view because the node browser already provides the means to access the block's children.

  See also:  [Using the node browser] [Subnode view] [Dump view] [Text view] [Raw view] [Node editing]