diff merge tool Archives

Tag Archive for: diff merge tool

Diff / Merge for Databases

May 9, 2011/in /by David McGahey

You may already be familiar with the diff/merge functionality Altova DiffDog brings to working with source code, XML, and Word files – but did you know you can also connect to, compare, and merge database data and structures? DiffDog supports all major relational databases and includes a Connection Wizard that lets you quickly connect to one or more. As shown in the screenshot below, natively supported databases include Microsoft® Access™, SQL Server®, Oracle®, MySQL®, IBM® DB2®, Sybase®, and PostgreSQL. Altova DiffDog database connect wizard When you compare different database types, DiffDog even resolves datatype naming inconsistencies. This means you can compare the customers table in your SQL Server database with a backup copy, for example, or you can compare the contents of any tables or your entire database schema between IBM DB2 9 and Oracle 11g implementations. Note: Altova DatabaseSpy includes the same diff/merge capabilities described here.

Database Content Differencing

It’s easy to compare database content in DiffDog. Simply connect to the database(s) required, and select the tables to be compared. DiffDog displays the compared components side-by-side, and tables and columns are mapped automatically based on configurable options. You can also change or create mapping connections manually when needed. After you click the Start Comparison button, DiffDog displays results with informative icons. In the simple example below, the content in the database tables is not equal. Next, you can launch a detailed comparison of the unequal table to see the content of the compared columns side-by-side, with differences highlighted. Tool bar buttons let you merge changes in either direction.

Database Schema Differencing

It’s just as easy to compare database schemas in DiffDog to, for example, identify and merge differences between a development and production version of the same database. All database items (e.g., data types, constraints, keys, etc.) are displayed in the comparison components so that you are able to compare the structure of the tables within the database schema. You can merge the two schemas or selected items using Left and Right buttons on the tool bar, or access more merging options via the right-click menu. Database schema changes aren’t merged instantly – DiffDog always creates a SQL change script compatible with your target database type that you can review before committing the changes to the database. Altova DiffDog database schema compare merge options You can also save the SQL script to a file or open it for further editing in DatabaseSpy. Learn more about the powerful database diff/merge functionality in DiffDog. You can also download a free trial to give it a test drive.

Tags: diff merge tool, DiffDog

Hot off the Press!

March 17, 2011/in /by Niki Devgood

The industry is abuzz with the latest news announcing our release of the MissionKit Version 2011 Release 2. The release is loaded with new features for chart and report creation, enhanced data mapping capabilities, new XML Schema editing functionality, support for the latest version of BPMN, and a really cool new feature for comparing and merging Microsoft® Word documents. Dr Dobb’s and SQL Server magazine are just a few of the industry publications and blogs that covered the launch. Read what the industry is buzzing about and then download a free 30-day trial of the MissionKit and check out for yourself all the powerful new features now available in our suite of XML, database, and UML tools!

Tags: Altova XMLSpy, Blog, BPMN, data mapping, database charts, database reports, diff merge tool, DiffDog, file comparison, MapForce, MissionKit, reporting tool, software tools, SQL Server, UML, v2011r2, XML charts, XML Editor

A Developer’s Life is Never Simple

December 22, 2009/in /by David McGahey

Earlier this month in our blog post on Comparing XML Schemas we showed a realistic – but simplified – example to illustrate a slick new feature of DiffDog 2010 to compare XML Schemas and update corresponding XML data files by generating XSL transformations.
A real-life XML developer’s project is rarely as small and straightforward as the example we used. In this post we will take a look at some typical complications developers face every day and how the Altova MissionKit cuts through complexity to enhance productivity.
Longer XML Schemas and Larger Mappings
Your XML Schemas are not likely to be as short and simple as the ones in our earlier post, and you will likely want to save your work while you are mapping your XML Schema migration. DiffDog lets you save your mapping in an XML Schema comparison file that you can reload later to continue your work, or to share with a colleague.

If you need to compare two XML Schemas on a regular basis, the XML Schema Comparison Document can be a valuable time saver.
Embedded XML Schema Assignment
The screen shot below shows the XML data file from our original example with one important difference. In this version the story element includes an embedded reference to the XML Schema on line 2.

When we transform this file with the simple XSLT we created in DiffDog, the new XML data file will not include the updated XML Schema reference. In our earlier blog post embedded XML Schema references weren’t an issue because we used the XMLSpy Project / Properties menu option to assign default XML Schemas for each folder.
If there are many XML data files to transform, and they require embedded XML Schema references, we can take advantage of an additional feature of MapForce. We can export our mapping from DiffDog to MapForce, as we did in the earlier post, and then use the Component Settings dialog for the MapForce output component to include the XML Schema reference.

Document Your Work
Developers can lose productivity trying to retrace history when a project needs additional work months or even years after an early iteration. The MapForce Generate Documentation feature can help us avoid this frustrating experience.
MapForce will document the mapping of each element in the XML Schemas in Microsoft Word, RTF, or HTML formats. Regardless which format we choose, the resulting document is an excellent stand-alone project artifact, or it can be further edited and included in a larger report.

We can even combine the MapForce mapping documentation with full descriptions of each version of the XML Schema generated with the XMLSpy XML Schema Editor documentation feature.
Source/Version Control
Source/version control systems let teams of developers work closely together on the same project without a risk of overwriting each others’ changes. Because a version of the source code is saved at each stage of the design process, it is very easy to look at or revert to an earlier version when needed.
Altova has implemented the Microsoft Source Code Control Interface (MSSCCI) v1.1 – v1.3 in XMLSpy and tested support for many popular source control systems, so we can manage the files in our XML Schema evolution project across the development enterprise. Additionally, DiffDog can be integrated with source control systems as the default comparison tool. DiffDog can even generate differences report files in a variety of formats.
See for yourself how the tools in the Altova MissionKit can cut through the complexity of your own XML, Web Services, data integration, XML publishing, XBRL, and UML modeling development projects – download a free 30-day trial!

Tags: Altova XMLSpy, diff merge tool, DiffDog, MapForce, MissionKit, v2010, XML Schema, XMLSpy, XSLT

Comparing XML Schemas with DiffDog 2010

December 10, 2009/in /by Erin Cavanaugh

DiffDog 2010 includes a powerful new tool to compare XML Schemas that XML developers and others can use to update existing XML data files as XML Schemas evolve. This post takes a look at an example scenario for this feature.Before we drop into the new functionality, let’s take a quick look at two XML Schemas using the DiffDog File Compare feature. Of course, just like in previous versions, DiffDog 2010 users can compare XML Schemas as .xsd documents and display differences in a color-coded, XML-aware format. This is a good way to identify and manage differences in XML Schemas, especially when you want to review revisions to industry-standard XML Schemas that evolve over time.What’s new in DiffDog 2010 is an additional XML Schema Differencing option that graphically displays two XML Schemas side by side, identifies identical elements automatically, and lets users map differences and generate XSL transformations to update XML data files.Here’s our first view when we open the same two XML Schemas shown in the file comparison above, using the new XML Schema Differencing feature. The root elements of the two XML Schemas are automatically connected. We can click the Compare button in the toolbar to automatically connect identical elements in the two XML Schemas. (Of course we could also select Compare XML Schemas from the right click context menu, or choose Start Comparison from the Diff and Merge menu, or press the F5 keyboard shortcut – DiffDog gives you many options to perform the same task, so you can work the way you like.)Next, we can map elements with different names in the two XML Schemas by manually connecting the pointer arrows between them. In this example most of the changes to the version of the XML Schema on the right simply give elements new names that will be more clear when the XML Schema and its data files are distributed through our enterprise. When all the elements are mapped, we can generate an XSLT file to transform existing XML data files based on the XML Schema on the left to reflect revisions in the newer version on the right. This feature is designed to rescue XML developers from the tedious tasks of writing and debugging XSL transformations by hand. Here is an example of an original XML data file based on the XML Schema on the left side, as viewed in Altova XMLSpy: The output file after applying the XSL transformation we created with DiffDog 2010 appears below. Note the substitution of the author element for writer, email for feedback, and so on. If there are many existing XML files that need to be transformed, the Project Management features of XMLSpy can help us automate the process. We can add external folders to an XMLSpy project. Using the XMLSpy properties dialog for each project folder, we can assign default values to assign an XML Schema for validation, the XSL transformation, and the destination of the output. Now we can select the input folder in the XMLSpy Project helper window and transform all the files in it with the single-keystroke F10 shortcut.When we originally mapped the XML Schema elements in DiffDog, we left the publication element on the left side unconnected, since it had no corresponding element in the earlier version of the schema. That means when we transform XML input files using the XSLT, the resulting output will not contain the publication element. If publication is a required element, we can call on Altova MapForce for a quick solution.One of the options in DiffDog is to generate a MapForce mapping rather than XSLT. When we choose this option, MapForce launches with our DiffDog mapping already loaded as a new MapForce design, as shown below. It’s easy to enhance the mapping by adding a constant as a default value for the publication element. Now we can save an XSL file from MapForce that reuses all the element mappings we originally designed in DiffDog and adds the constant. When we apply the new XSL to transform our original XML data file, we get a result that includes the default value for the publication element. This post started by describing the new XML Schema Comparison feature in DiffDog 2010. Fleshing out a simple – but typical – real-world example quickly highlighted additional tasks easily completed by taking advantage of tight integration with XMLSpy and MapForce.All three of these tools and more are available at substantial savings in the Altova MissionKit 2010, the integrated suite of XML, database, and UML tools designed to meet the diverse development and data management needs of today’s software architects and XML developers. Click here to download a free trial today!

Tags: Altova XMLSpy, diff merge tool, DiffDog, file comparison, MapForce, MissionKit, v2010, XML Schema, XMLSpy, XSLT

DiffDog Reports for Service

July 22, 2009/in /by David McGahey

A recent message on Twitter asked whether DiffDog can create a differences report. The short answer is yes! In addition to its renowned directory compare and merge, file compare and merge, database compare and merge, and XML diff merge functionality, Altova DiffDog can create differences reports for directory comparisons and for file comparisons. After you select the directories or files and the compare options you want to apply, you can create a report file by choosing Export differences from the DiffDog File menu. This opens a Save File dialog that lets you choose to create the diff report in text format or as an XML file. Text format reports follow the well-accepted Unix diff style. In the directory comparison example report below, the < character indicates a file that exists only on the left side, > indicates a file exists only on the right, and ! signifies file names that occur in both directories with unequal content. Report files in XML format are human-readable with descriptive element names and record the the comparison mode and the paths of the directories compared: You can also use the DiffDog directory report functionality to create diff report files for comparisons of Zip archives or OOXML documents. Developers and other project stakeholders often want to keep a record of changes to source code files in a software project. DiffDog can create diff reports for all comparisons of text-based files, including source code files. DiffDog can even create detailed XML-aware reports for XML file comparisons. The illustration below shows two versions of a Java source code file: If you read our earlier series on Reverse Engineering an Existing App with Altova UModel, you may recognize this code. Lines 8 and 9 on the left introduce a new class property called fee that is set to an initial value of 2. Here is the file compare report for the differences shown above in text format: And the XML version of the report for the same portion of the files: You can even execute DiffDog from a command line to create differences reports automatically. Here is an example of a short batch file that compares the same two directories from our GUI example and writes the output in XML in a file named diff_1.xml: The DiffDog Help system includes extensive documentation on all the command line options, including specific instructions on how to integrate DiffDog with 19 popular source control systems. If DiffDog report files get your tail wagging, don’t just Twitter about it! Click here to download a free 30-day trial of Altova DiffDog.

Tags: diff merge tool, DiffDog, directory comparison, file comparison, Java

Teach DiffDog a New Trick

March 13, 2009/in /by Niki Devgood

Teach DiffDog a New Trick You can easily train DiffDog, Altova’s diff/merge tool for files, directories, and databases, to correctly interpret new file types. For instance, more and more file standards are taking advantage of the Zip compression format to deliver entire sets of files in a single convenient package. Let’s say you want to use DiffDog to examine and compare files created by Google Earth that are saved in .kmz archives. When you initially open a folder containing .kmz documents, then attempt to compare two files in a DiffDog document window, DiffDog reports the .kmz files contain binary content: Diff merge tool DiffDog message All you have to do is add the .kmz file extension in the File Types tab of the DiffDog Options dialog: And click the Zip conformant radio button to assign the correct behavior: Compare zip archives Now that DiffDog understands the .kmz file extension is a Zip archive, it expands the Directory compare window to list all the component files. You can see differences inside the archives. When you double-click any file pair, DiffDog automatically fetches them from the Zip archives and presents them for interactive editing in a new File Compare window. However, some of the file types enclosed in the Zip archive are also unknown. We learned from reading the XML Aficionado blog entry on Google Earth and XMLSpy that .kml files are an open XML-based standard for geo-spatial information. We can add .kml to DiffDog files types and specify XML-conformant syntax coloring: XML syntax coloring Now DiffDog displays the files with syntax coloring and we can apply all the DiffDog XML-aware differencing functionality. DiffDog file compare If you dig deeper into the .kmz archive, you’ll discover .dae files are also XML-based. After you add .dae to the DiffDog files list and set it as XML-compliant, give yourself a treat! Compare .dae DiffDog is available as a standalone tool or as part of the Altova MissionKit tool suite. The recently released DiffDog Version 2009 added powerful database content diff/merge capabilities – take a free trial for a walk around the block.

Tags: diff merge tool, DiffDog

Altova customer Recordare builds MusicXML-based solution

January 20, 2009/in /by Niki Devgood

Case Studies

Recordare® is a technology company focused on providing software and services to the musical community. Their flagship products, the Dolet® plugin family, are platform-independent plugins for popular music notation programs, facilitating the seamless exchange and interaction of sheet music data files by leveraging MusicXML. Dolet acts as a high quality translator between the MusicXML data format and other applications, enabling users to work with these files on any conceivable system, including industry leading notation and musical composition applications Finale® and Sibelius®. The list of MusicXML adopters also includes optical scanning utilities like SharpEye or capella-scan, music sequencers like Cubase, and beyond. Dolet increases the MusicXML support in all of these programs and promotes interoperability and the sharing of musical scores. In creating the Dolet plugins, Recordare used Altova’s XML editor, XMLSpy, for editing and testing the necessary MusicXML XML Schemas and DTDs, and the diff/merge tool, DiffDog, for regression testing.

The Challenge

Music interchange between applications had traditionally been executed using the MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) file format, a message transfer protocol that has its roots in electronic music. MIDI is not an ideal transfer format for printed music, because it does not take into account the multitude of notations (e.g., rests, repeats, dynamics, lyrics, slurs, tempo marks, etc.) that convey much of the meaning. MusicXML is an open, XML-based file format specifically created to encapsulate musical notation or digital sheet music data that was built on top of previous formats, MuseData and Humdrum. XML lends MusicXML the power and flexibility to be easily accessed, parsed, rendered, and otherwise manipulated by a wide variety of automated tools, and its general acceptance as a standard makes it an ideal format for scoring using computer technology. Since its original release by Recordare in January of 2004 (version 2.0 was released in June 2007), MusicXML has gained acceptance in the music notation industry with support in over 100 leading products, and is recognized as the de facto XML standard for music notation interchange. These products would not have adopted MusicXML unless it could be used to exchange data with industry-leading applications like Finale and Sibelius. By developing advanced plugins for popular music notation suites, Recordare would be able to deliver to their customers all of the advantages that XML can bring for data exchange and standardization.

The Solution

Below is an example showing the score of the first few measures of Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 as it is written in sheet music: and a small snippet of the same piece translated to MusicXML: The MusicXML-based Dolet 4 plugins for Finale and Sibelius provide a more accurate and usable representation of sheet music than Standard MIDI translation. For example, the images below show the same piece of music. On the left is a Finale 2009 rendering of a MIDI file exported from Sibelius, and on the right is the same application’s interpretation of a MusicXML 2.0 file exported from the same version of Sibelius.
In the MIDI rendition, vital information like chord symbols, lyrics, slurs, articulations, and even title and composer are omitted from the translation. In addition to providing native support for MusicXML, the recently released Dolet 4 for Finale and Dolet 4 for Sibelius plugins enhance the capabilities of these programs by adding advanced features like:

Batch translation
More accurate and reliable data exchange
More formatting control
Support for the MusicXML XML Schema (in addition to the DTD)

In developing the plugins, Recordare was subject to specific requirements dictated by the Sibelius and Finale applications. The Sibelius plugin was programmed in ManuScript, and is one of the largest plugins ever written in that language. Finale, on the other hand, requires plugins to have a C++ core, and Recordare implemented this, adding MusicXML logic in Java and a JNI layer to provide the two-way Java/C++ communication. Recordare’s Dolet plugins are now critical aspects of the music preparation process for many television and film scores as well as new music publications. Errors in translation need to be fixed in maintenance updates, while ensuring that no new errors are introduced into these complex translation plugins. Regression testing of the MusicXML file produced by the Dolet plugins is thus an essential part of Recordare’s quality assurance process. Recordare used Altova’s DiffDog in the development of the Dolet plugins. XMLSpy was used to test and edit their DTDs and XML Schemas, and DiffDog for regression testing the MusicXML files produced by the software. Recordare has several regression test suites covering a wide range of musical repertoire, from baroque to hip-hop. DiffDog allows easy differencing of multiple runs of these test suites, including the ability to ignore differences in XML metadata elements such as software version and XML creation date that always change across test cases. Recordare has used Altova’s XMLSpy XML editor to edit the MusicXML DTDs and XML Schemas, starting with the use of XMLSpy 3.5 (released in 2001) to create the earliest alpha and beta versions of the MusicXML DTD. Version 2.0 of MusicXML added a compressed zip version of the format, similar to what is used in other XML applications like Open Office and Open XML. XMLSpy 2008 Enterprise Edition’s comprehensive support for zipped XML files made it easy to test this new feature together with the Dolet for Finale plugin.

A small portion of the extensive MusicXML schema shown in XMLSpy’s graphical XML schema editor

XMLSpy’s support for XQuery has also contributed to Recordare’s regression testing efforts. In response to a customer request, Recordare now exports XML processing instructions from the Dolet for Sibelius plugin when it encounters a musical feature that it is unable to translate correctly. A simple XQuery execution to search for all the processing instructions in the XML files in a given folder lets Recordare check for the presence of these restrictions within each test suite, and then compare the resulting XML files using DiffDog between runs of the test suite. Recently, customer demand led Recordare to develop an XSD version of the MusicXML format. XMLSpy Enterprise Edition was used to develop and test the schemas. Schema validation, schema restriction and extension, and automatically-generated schema documentation were all able to be tested using XMLSpy’s features.

The Results

The Dolet plugins are extensions for common industry software that harness the built-in capabilities of the MusicXML format to make musical scores truly interchangeable across disparate systems and toolsets. These plugins have the capacity to render accurate and meaningful musical notation based on the powerful MusicXML specification. The leading XML Schema editing capabilities in XMLSpy and the strong XML and directory differencing support in DiffDog enabled Recordare to write and polish the MusicXML schemas and perform regression testing on the Dolet plugins. The resulting high quality of the schemas and software has made MusicXML and the Dolet plugins a key element of the toolkit for composers, arrangers, publishers, copyists, and engravers throughout the industry wherever printed music is used. Try XMLSpy, DiffDog, and the other Altova MissionKit tools for yourself with a free 30-day trial.

Tags: Altova, Altova XMLSpy, Case Study, diff merge tool, DiffDog, MusicXML, Recordare, XML Editor, XML Schema, XMLSpy