Configuring Preferences

To access the Preferences dialog box, Select Window > Preferences... (or TopBraid Composer > Preferences... on a Mac) from the main menu.

To change the size or style of fonts used by TopBraid Composer, select General > Appearance > Colors and Fonts on the Preferences dialog box and locate TopBraid Composer in the list. To customize TopBraid Composer's behavior, Select TopBraid Composer instead of General. Additional specialized TopBraid Composer configuration panels are available under that on the left side of the Preferences dialog box.

• Top-level TopBraid Composer preferences
• Additional TopBraid Composer panels
• Importing and exporting preferences

Top-level TopBraid Composer Preferences

If you are working with database projects, you may find that large amounts of data transfer hurts performance. TopBraid offers several ways to fine-tune this:

• Caches of certain frequently-used triples are populated and maintained when a database is being opened. In the default setting, for example, all rdf:type triples are loaded into memory because the type information is needed almost everywhere in the user interface—even to determine a resource's icon. While the caches significantly improve speed, they have the downside that in some cases even the caches may overflow, increasing startup time. TBC-ME users, note that this setting is only used if the Cache all Graphs option is switched off in the Server Administration pages.
• Maximum number of instances to display limits the number of rows for the Instances View, Triples View and SPARQL View. If you are not using a database project, you may want to raise the maximum to a larger number.
• Maximum number of values on forms limits the number of rows for a specific property on the Resource Forms. If a resource has many values for a given property, the form may otherwise become slow.

The option Also open editors for imported files can be used to let the system automatically open windows for each imported file. With the default value of 0, no other editors will be opened, but you can increase this if you have large projects with many dependent files that you want to edit in parallel.

You can also configure how resources are displayed in the various views such as the Classes View. If you have a multi-lingual ontology, you can specify a list of language tags, such as "en" or "pt" to filter only those rdfs:label values that match the language. Note that you need to switch on the human-friendly labels display mode in the main tool bar to see those labels everywhere.

Additional TopBraid Composer panels

Underneath TopBraid Composer in the Preferences navigation hierarchy you will find the following more specialized panels to configure TopBraid Composer behavior. When the panel is complex enough to require its own help page, the list below links to it:

• Classes View Preferences: what RDF, RDFS and OWL concepts are visible in the Classes View.
• Diagram Preferences: what should appear in the Diagram Panel.
• Error Handling: advanced options for modifying the handling of certain classes of errors.
• Forms Preferences: configuring the layout policies of Forms.
• Graph Preferences: what should appear in the Graph Panel.
• Input/Output: configuring the use of a proxy server, whether to check for missing imports and whether imported graphs may be loaded from the web.
• Properties View Preferences: what RDF, RDFS and OWL concepts are visible in the Properties View.
• Source Code Preferences: what should be the language for Source Code editing.
• SPARQL Engine: for configuring the use of the Jena ARQ SPARQL engine.
• SPIN: for specifying the settings for editing and rendering SPIN SPARQL expressions and for executing SPIN inferences and constraint checks.
• SWP: for specifying the settings used by the SPARQL Web Pages engine.

Importing and exporting preferences

Preference files can be both imported to and exported from the TopBraid Composer allowing you to easily share individual or group preferences.

The Import wizard can be used to import preferences from the local file system to the Composer.

To import a preference file:

1. Select File > Import.
2. In the Import wizard select Preferences and click Next.
3. Click Browse... and locate the Preferences file on the local file system.
4. Select one of the following:
   • Import all to accept all of the preferences defined in the file.
   • Choose specific preferences to import to select only specified preferences defined in the file.
5. Click Finish.

The Export wizard can be used to export preferences from the Composer to the local file system.

To export a preference file:

1. Select File > Export.
2. In the Export wizard select Preferences and click Next.
3. Select one of the following:
   • Export all to add all of the preferences to the file.
   • Choose specific preferences to export to add only specified preferences to the file.
4. Click Browse... and locate the preferences file on the local file system.
5. Click Finish

Note: If no changes have been made to the original preference settings the preferences file will be empty.