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This section describes the XML Diff Viewer and its features, including the different views available for comparing documents, the XML Diff Viewer tool bar, and tools for loading documents.
This section covers the following topics:
You use the XML Diff Viewer to compare two or more XML documents. By default, the XML Diff Viewer displays the diffed documents on the Split View - Tree tab. This view, shown in Figure 132, shows the documents side-by-side using a tree/node representation.
In split views (there is also a split view that shows documents in XML), source documents are displayed on the left, the target document on the right. A splitter between the two panes allows you to change the width of the source and target document panes by dragging the splitter to the left and right.
The Split View - Text tab also shows source and target documents side-by-side in plain XML.
If you prefer, you can select the Merged View tab, which folds the nodes from the source and target documents into a single window, as shown in Figure 134
.
The merged view displays changed items in pairs - the item from the target document appears first, the item from the source document is shown second, as shown in Figure 135.
In this example, the line through the <au_lname> element in the source document, Hennings, indicates that it has changed to White in the target document.
<au_lname>
Hennings
White
All views use the same symbols and color schemes to identify the types of changes detected by the Stylus Studio diff calculation - by default, green for added items, yellow for changed items, and red for removed items. In addition, the text font and size are controlled by the settings for the XML Editor on the Editor Format page of the Options dialog box.
See Symbols and Background Colors for more information on this topic, and to learn how you can assign custom colors to the results of standard differencing operations.
The XML Diff Viewer tool bar, shown in Figure 136, provides tools to help you
The following table identifies the individual tools and tells you where to find more information.
The XML Diff Viewer provides several tools for working with source and target documents:
You use the remove button, the folder with the red minus sign on it ( ), to remove the current source document from the XML diff calculation.
If Stylus Studio determines that the load or diff operation for a given XML document will take more than a moment, it displays a message and an Abort button at the bottom of the XML Diff Viewer window. You can click the Abort button to terminate the operation at any time. The message and the button are removed from the XML Diff Viewer window once the operation is complete or cancelled.
You cannot remove a target document. You can specify a different target document by clicking the set target button ( ) again. This replaces the current target document with the document you select.
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) to alert you to the fact that you can add multiple source documents when diffing XML documents. You can specify only a single target document, however.
), to remove the current source document from the XML diff calculation.
) again. This replaces the current target document with the document you select.
