a wishlist for registry comparison and others

[dfeistm1]

Visio and HTML Comparisons/Merge

Is there going to be support to compare/merge Visio files? We use Visoio a lot and need to compare and merge changes manually. This consumes a lot of time when the change is large.

Also, we have XML files which use XSL to transform into HTML pages. It would really great to be able to compare the to HTML documents after the XSL is run instead of just comparing the XML source files. Currently, we use change attribute to mark adds and deletes so that the XSL transform shows these in different colors. The problem is going back to the XML source and cleaning it up after the review.

[Chris]

Sorry, support for Visio files isn't something we're likely to add in the near future. If you can Save As the Visio files as some kind of text file, that's probably your best comparison option in Beyond Compare.

Can you clarify your second request? Do you want to compare XML files to HTML files?

[dfeistm1]

Chris:
Hopefully, this will explain things a little better about the HTML compare. What we have are XML documents that are rendered as HTML output via an XSL transformation. I would like to compare the HTML output instead of just the XML documents. Is there a way to get beyond compare to execute the XSL transform (much like a browser does) and then compare the HTML output? This would be very useful for reviews since users can see the diff of the final output instead of the source XML documents.

[Chris]

If you have a command line tool that can execute the XSL transform, you can create a file format in Beyond Compare to call it automatically.

Example: Say you have a command line tool named "XMLtoHTML.exe" that takes a source XML file and outputs an HTML file. Example command line: XMLtoHTML.exe input.xml output.html

In Beyond Compare 3, select "Tools > File Formats". Click "New". Select "Text Format" as the type. Name it XML to HTML and enter *.xml as the file extension.

Go to the Conversion tab. Change Conversion from "None" to "External program (Unicode filenames)". In the Loading: box, enter the path to your conversion tool, followed by variables for source file (%s) and target/output (%t) file. Example: c:\XMLtoHTML.exe %s %t

Save the file format changes. Now when you open XML files, BC will run them through the converter and open the result in the Text Compare.

For an example of an existing file format that calls a conversion program, look at the PDF file format that comes with BC3.