Best view in an explorer is Script Debugger’s most powerful way for you to examine, understand, and interact with a value.

Best view is particularly significant in the following cases:

• If the value being viewed is an object reference, the object’s elements and properties are shown as an interactive outliner. You can discover object attributes and their values, learn how to reference an object attribute, dive deeper into attributes that are themselves objects, and much more. This is one of Script Debugger’s key features.

• Similarly, if the value is a collection (a list or a record), the items of the collection are displayed in an outliner.

• If the value is a valid alias or file object reference, it is shown as a pathname that can be displayed in different styles:

  • HFS (colon-delimited)

  • POSIX (slash-delimited)

  • Finder (i.e., as the Finder would refer to it)

  You can also get a Quick Look view of the item (choose File > Quick Look, or press the Quick Look button), or view the item in the Finder (choose File > Reveal XXX in Finder, or press the Finder button).

• If the value is image data, it is shown as an image.

• If the value is HTML source, it is optionally rendered as in a browser. This behavior is governed by a Dictionary preference, “Render HTML string values as HTML page”.

• If the value is a date, it is shown as a date chooser, usually along with an outliner showing its properties.

• If the value is a string, it is shown directly as text (as opposed to source view, which shows a quoted string, possibly containing escaped characters).

Otherwise, you won’t see much difference from source view.

Read on to learn about how to use an outliner!

You can show more than one view at once. To do so, hold Shift as you switch views. The result is a split-pane display of multiple views.