I do know of a couple of PowerBuilder diff tools that are shareware. But are there any that are freeware or open source?
A:
Your version control system should include some kind of diff utility. There are different free ones available that should work if they support the SCC API.
If you want to look at diffs of PB objects outside of source control, you can export the object. PB exports have different filename extensions but they are are text files and you can then use any diff PB tool to compare items.
Bernard Dy
2010-02-18 00:34:34
Actually, PB source presents problems for ASCII compare tools. If PB chooses to reorder events or controls under the covers, an ASCII compare tool will be comparing wrong portions, giving false positives. You can try an ASCII compare tool, but you need to be careful that it is giving you accurate results.
Terry
2010-02-18 02:03:01
And we won't even mention comparing DataWindows. OK, I just did. A "line of code" in a DataWindow is a long list of attributes, and knowing that the line is different is incredibly less important than *what* has changed in that line. And again, in the source the order of the UI elements represents the Z-order, so a "Bring to Front" or "Send to Back" could mean the ASCII compare tool is trying to compare two different UI elements. What a compare tool needs to know is to compare lines with the same "name" attribute, not just lines in a sequence.
Terry
2010-02-18 17:41:12
@Terry Yes, good points all, and thanks for the detail. I am also remiss for not having mentioned PBL Peeper.
Bernard Dy
2010-02-18 23:57:37
+5
A:
You might look at PBL Peeper. It had a Compare feature, in addition to a great deal of other capabilities:
http://techno-kitten.com/PBL_Peeper/Quick_Overview/quick_overview.html
Bruce Armstrong
2010-02-18 01:43:50
Sure, beat me to it. <g> It's pretty basic (DOS FC-based) and you probably need to crack the included docs to figure it out (I've found some people have difficulty with it... need to work on that). But, it does proper PB compares (normal ASCII compare tools can give false positives) and it does give you a number of options (e.g. ignore comments) that should give you what you want.
Terry
2010-02-18 01:59:21
Terry - perhaps having identified the changed portions, you could spit them out (a-la the tree's Copy>Title/Contents) for a GUI diff tool to display instead of showing the FC diff? That's what I do by hand now for really nasty diffs.
Hugh Brackett
2010-02-18 15:51:24
Lots of ideas. Lots of plans. (Like being able to define your own ASCII diff tool to use.) Not enough time in the day to do them. Not near enough money to support the effort. <g> The problem is, there's a good commercial tool (PBDelta) that does GUI diffs, but there are lots of development challenges that have no tool to deal with them yet. GUI diffs keep on getting bumped down the list.
Terry
2010-02-18 17:35:19