Eclipse is far from my favorite tool for anything, but it does have some good XML tools.

To template anything in XML, define a schema, and apply it to your XML document.
Most XML editing tools will treat a proper XML schema like a code-completion template and will prompt with attributes, value formats, etc...

XML schema format is defined by the W3C at http://www.w3.org/standards/xml/schema

It's pretty detailed, but the tutorials may help a bit.

Eclipse has some extended XML editors available as plugins; be sure to load and enable those before working on a schema, as they'll help quite a bit.

Good luck,
==Joseph++

P.S. if you're stuck in the grip of that unpleasantly monopolistic proprietary ecosystem, then the Altova (http://www.altova.com/xmlspy.html) tools are incredibly good for XML, but they are completely proprietary and just the XML suite costs $500 or $1000.

Bryan O'Neal wrote:
> I need to edit some large scale XML and while I like eclipse it seems
> woefully inadequate for the task. Usually I feel this way because I
> don't know what I am doing with Eclipse. So something simple like I
> want to create a template that says when I add an "interface_item" I
> want the following attributes and and elements defined. But I can not
> figure out how to do this. For that matter I can not figure out how to
> simply copy and past and item or group of attributes - any help?
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