Dear M. Shafie,
With XXE 5.2, we seem close to have an efficient XML-aware difference
engine connected with our SCM system (we use Perforce), at least as far
as DocBook documents are concerned. However, we are facing a
problematic issue with this right now; I'll try to explain it below, I
hope my explanations are more or less clear...
*Workflow:*
In our SCM system, we have defined XXE (5.2) as our difference viewing
tools for the DocBook documents; what users usually do from the SCM GUI
frontend is that they usually select a DocBook file from their
workspace, and ask to see the difference with the last repository version.
*Description of the issue:*
When the XML document is monolithic, everything goes OK, and we can
activate the change tool and start scanning the differences.
When the XML document is a flexible DocBook document containing
references to external entities or XML documents, we get into problems:
XXE is unable to transclude these XInclude statement (the SCM tools only
retrieves the XML file itself not the related resources) and thus
consider that the repository version has been manually edited by another
application... refusing to let us scan the changes.
:-[ Needless to say, almost all our Docbook documents except the most
simple ones, are flexible documents...
*A Suggestion:*
When comparing two DocBook documents, we usually do not need to
transclude the XIncluded resources, for they corresponding themselves to
files stored somewhere else, and are thus easily comparable individually
themselves.
It is possible to improve the change mechanism so that it simply skips
(e.g. untransclude) the XInclude elements during the time of the change
examination process, simply showing the differences in the XInclude
elements themselves (e.g. A changed file's path) ? This could simply be
an option of the comparison tool.
We do not know if this is feasible, neither if this would be the best
option, you may have better suggestions. Right now, however, we do not
see how to use XXE changes with complex documents in connection with our
SCM tool.
Sorry for this (too) long description, and many thanks for you help,
Best regards.
Philippe.
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