xmlcomparisoncontent-management

Tool or library for comparing xml files

I am looking for an XML comparing tool that understands xml. It cannot be a line by line comparision like WinMerge or Beyond Compare.

An ideal solution would be one that shows changes similar to the way Word 2007 shows track changes. DeltaXML does this, but does not come with a real GUI 'out of the box' and is $500 per user!:

ExamXml works out of the box but displays the differences in a confusing manner. It does not have a concept of before and after, it just shows the differences:

alt text
(source: a7soft.com)

The tool should have the concept of using attributes as a key, so that it does not think that a reordered list of elements has changed. DeltaXML does this but I failed to set it up correctly for the screen shot.

UPDATE:

So far ExamlXML is the best out of the box solution. But it lacks the change management concepts of DeltaXML. Resulting in some usability problems.

DeltaXML is pretty much the solution I need, but something with more functionality out of the box would be better. DeltaXML requires writing java code to call the api, along with writing XSL to transform the xml into the expected input.

Solution

  • If I understand your problem, you likely have an application that uses XML files as the data storage and the GUI abstracts the "technical" tag names into "user friendly" labels - again, I am assuming. So it would be a natural extension to view differences in a similar way. I am also assuming your application doesn't have a diff facility that follows the "abstraction" concept.

    I did some searching and found one app (ExamXML) that seems to come close with highlighting features. I downloaded the eval version and tested your files against it:

    http://www.programmedintheusa.com/images/stack547399.png

    It does a pretty good job of highlighting the differences. It seems pretty interactive and pops up with how many differences. It looks like you can change the colors it uses, so maybe you can use grays and whites to de-emphasize the tags. It also seems to have a lot of options that you can pre-set for your users as well.

    I want to note that you will be hard pressed to find an XML comparison tool that will not show the tag names, as the tags are what give the content context. If you take away context, it becomes difficult to understand the data being displayed. Anyhow, maybe this tool might be helpful. Have you also tried to show your users some of these tools and see what they are willing to tolerate, sometimes they may surprise you. Hope this helps!