How to treat mpb files as archives

[Schnaddel]

Hi Support Team,

Thanks to the fact that Beyond Compare treats archives as folder I can compare their contents file by file. That's great

I always use ModelMaker to design my software. ModelMaker saves the UML models in *.mpb files, which are in fact archives containing four XML files. If I change the file extension to .rar, I can do both open them with inRAR as well as get Beyond Compare to treat them as folder (i.e. BC displays the four XML files).

Unfortunately I haven't found any means to make BC thinking of mpb files like archives. There are two registry keys which seem to be a candidate for that:
HKCU\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare 3\BcShellEx\ArchiveMasks
HKCU\Software\Scooter Software\Beyond Compare\Settings\ArchiveMasks

But even if I add *.mpb to that lists of file extensions BC continues to display a compare of two mpb files as text comparison.

If I patch the PCompare.exe (change the letters "ear" to "mpb" at offset 006AEB2E) the comparison behaves as desired: a mpb file comparison treats the mpb file as an archive and displays the four xml files

But that's only to see it might work - I do not want to use a patched exe because I cannot exclude unwanted side effects...

Can you instruct me how to setup BC to accept / treat mpb files as archives? Or if there is no option to do that: would you mind to add mpb files to the internal list of archive file extensions?

Best regards
Michael

[Zoë]

Open the Options dialog, switch to the "Folder Views" tab, and add *.mpb as an extension next to the "Zip" entry under "Archive Associations".

[Schnaddel]

Thank you for your fast reply - that's exactly what I was looking for. It works fine

Best regards
Michael