The Type Browser allows you to view and open editors on the elements of metamodels, including graph, object, relationship and role types. You can view design elements of these types by project, and open editors on the design elements. In addition, you can open, close and create projects. Thus, the Type Browser is used both for working with graph types, and for working with graphs and their elements, in the case that the user knows the type of the element.

You can access a Type Browser either by activating the ‘Type Browser’ notebook page in the Main Launcher, or alternatively open a new instance of it in its own window by selecting Browsers | Type Browser. Figure 3–27 shows a Type Browser window.

The list in the middle shows all the available graph types of that kind. You may determine which kinds of types (graph, object, relationship, role or property types) are visible in the middle list from the pull-down list labeled Show. By default all the graph types are shown, as in Figure 3–27.

Selecting a type in the middle list fills the right-hand list with all the currently loaded instances of that type that are in the selected projects. The contents of the instances list on the right thus change according to the selections made in the other two lists. For example, in Figure 3–27 the user is browsing all ‘WatchApplication’ graphs in the ‘Digital Watch’ project.

In general, browsing design data by type will only show data that has already been read from the repository (all graphs in a project and their immediately contained objects, roles and relationships are read automatically when the project is opened). Because MetaEdit+ intelligently loads information from the repository only as it is accessed, and flushes little-used objects when memory is low to improve performance, some objects may not be found when accessed by their type. Especially at the start of a session, searches by type on data other than graphs are likely to miss many objects, as they have not yet been loaded.

Load More Repository allows you to load more of the repository contents, and can be used if you think there should be an instance available but MetaEdit+ does not list it. Another way is to access the object by following links from objects already loaded, e.g. opening graphs or property dialogs.

The kind of types shown in the middle list can be selected through the Show pull-down list: selecting Graphs shows all graph types in the list, Objects all object types, Relationships all relationship types, Roles all role types and Properties all property types respectively. The types in the list are organized in a tree view according to their inheritance structure.

The pop-up menu for the types list, as in Figure 3–28, allows you to create a graph, view or edit a type, get information about it, reversibly remove types, and salvage removed types.

In addition, all graph types have a pop-up menu item for creating a new graph of that type. To create a graph in the Type Browser:

A property dialog appears asking information about the graph to be created. After entering information and pressing OK a new graph with the given properties appears in the list on the right.

Double-click the new graph to edit it in an editor.

The list of the instances on the right also has a pop-up menu. For the graph instances, i.e. when Graphs is selected from the Show pull-down list, the menu is similar to that in the Graph list in Graph Browser (see Figure 3–25 and the description of the menu there). For objects, roles and relationships the menu is similar to that of elements list in Graph Browser (see Figure 3–26 and the description of the menu there), with the exception of the Replace Tool that is not available in the Type Browser.