Diff Viewer

The Visual Process Diff tool provides the ability to view changes made to process files visually for different revisions.

To enable diff viewer, navigate to Windows > Preferences > BusinessWorks > Team Development. Select the Enable visual diff check box under Diff Tool Options. By default, this check box is always selected.

The Visual Process Diff tool is used to compare:
  • Process or Scope Variables (primitive types only)
  • BW Palette Activities
  • Process Properties (Application and Module Properties)
  • Shared Resources (Resources which are shipped only with the product)
  • Groups
  • Fault Handlers
After comparing the different revisions of a process, the diff viewer displays the process with decorations to indicate the changes in activities. It also navigates controls through the modified activities and their properties.

Change Indicators- These are small indicators displayed on the process to indicate the activity change.

Change Indicators
Blue indicates a newly added activity.
Red indicates deletion of an activity.
Orange indicates changes in one or more properties of that activity.

Navigation Controls: The navigation controls help to navigate through the property changes.

Activity Navigation Control
Navigate to the next difference.

It navigates to the next activity which has changed.

Navigate back to the previous difference.

It navigates back to the previous activity which has changed.

While navigating, current activity change is marked by selection indicators and property view for respective activities are displayed on each side.
Navigation Property Changes
Next Property Difference- Navigate to the next property change.

It navigates to the next property within the current object which has changed.

Previous Property Difference- Navigate back to the previous property change.

It navigates back to the previous property within the current object which has changed.

All the modified properties and their corresponding tabs are shown in blue color to indicate the change. While navigating through the properties, current property is highlighted in Yellow.

In the above example, only the General and Input tabs are highlighted, since the properties displayed on these tabs are changed.

There are different modes of operations by which diff viewer is viewed:
  • Compare with Local History
  • Compare with Each Other
  • Compare with another revision from an SVN Repository
  • Compare with another revision from Git Repository

Attention:
  • The diff viewer is not supported for:
    • LDAP Authentication
    • Password field in a shared resource
    • REST and SOAP Reference
  • The namespace registry feature does auto-populate namespace prefixes, due to which change is indicated in the input of an activity, but there will be no visible change on the UI. This change may come as a side effect of changing input mapping of any activity in the process. The auto-population of prefixes can be disabled by selecting the Auto populate process namespace registry with generated prefixes for namespaces check box under Windows > Preferences > BusinessWorks > Namespace Registry.

  • It is not possible to make any edits in the BW Compare view. To make new changes, select the Design view.