DeltaXML Newsletter - January 2002
Contents
In this month's issue:
- DeltaXML's new upgrade
- Comparing unordered data
- New "use-case" papers
DeltaXML's new upgrade
Version 2.03 is now available for downloading. This release fixes a number of minor problems with unordered comparisons and re-combination of unordered data is now implemented (combining a delta with one of the original files to generate the other original file). If an unordered comparison is important to you, please use this latest version in your evaluation. This new version is now implemented in the DeltaXML demonstration (select the 'Online demo' at http://www.deltaxml.com).
Comparing unordered data
The ability of DeltaXML to compare unordered data is proving useful to a number of DeltaXML users - it is already in production use. This makes use of keys so that the corresponding items in the two files are always compared, whatever order they may appear in within the two files. This can also be used to strip out unchanged data so that you only need to process items that have changed.
It is not difficult to use XSL to configure DeltaXML for your specific XML file structure, and there are now two papers describing how to do this, see below:
New "use-case" papers
There are now a number of papers available on http://www.deltaxml.com, showing how DeltaXML can be used for specific applications. For further details on the papers visit: http://www.deltaxml.com/tech_details.html. The information includes:
Introduction to DeltaXML (pdf) (12 pages) [http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/introduction-deltaxml.pdf]: shows you how DeltaXML represents any changes to any XML files in XML and has a number of simple worked examples covering 'add/delete/modify' for elements and attributes, namespaces and changes in deeply nested XML files.
Comparing Unordered XML Data using DeltaXML Markup (pdf) (15 pages) [http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/comparing-unordered-xml.pdf]: shows you how to use DeltaXML Markup to compare XML elements that are unordered.
Using XSL to add DeltaXML keys to XML data (pdf) (22 pages) [http://www.deltaxml.com/pdf/using-xsl-to-add-keys.pdf]: shows you how to use XSL to automatically add 'deltaxml:unordered' and 'deltaxml:key' attributes to any XML data. The paper uses XML Schema as an example and shows you how to produce an XSL stylesheet that enables Schema files to be compared intelligently, ignoring order changes that are not important. Using the methods in this paper, you can produce a stylesheet for your own XML data to ensure DeltaXML knows which elements are not ordered and finds corresponding elements in the two files.
Notes on comparing large files (10Mb+) [http://www.deltaxml.com/comparing-large-files.html]: DeltaXML Version 2 is much faster than previous releases and can be applied to larger files. The notes discuss important issues when comparing larger files.