Treating sections as atomic

[mircohering]

Hi there,

i am trying to find out how i can configure Beyond Compare to treat sections as atomic.

E.g.
File1:
Start
var 1 = 1
var 2 = 1
End

File2:
Start
var 1 = 2
var 2 = 1
End

File3:
Start
var 1 = 1
var 2 = 2
End

Now normally BeyondCompare would be able to automerge this, but i want to teach it to treat sections as atomic. How do i do that?

[Aaron]

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestion, but BC3 does not currently support grouping these sections into a "different" section or conflict. Adding features that would allow syntax detection and such are on our wishlist, but are larger features that would not be soon coming.

I played around with this example a bit, but the only workaround I was able to come up with so far is to enable "Never Align Differences". This caused the files to not align the different text, and treated the differences as conflicts. Depending on your actual files, however, this is likely not an optimal solution.

[mircohering]

Hi Aaron,

the way i would implement it, is to allow grammar items to be treated in three different ways:
- Unimportant
- Important
- Atomic

For the atomic setting you bascially treat sections as lines (e.g. if there is a difference within aligned sections between files you throw back a conflict).

I think this would be very useful for files that have a bit of an odd structure (my example is applets in Siebel files for which i want to resolve the conflict manually if any difference is detected in the same applet within a file).

Anyway - i guess i will have to write my own scripts for now to do some pre-processing.

[Aaron]

It would also help if you submitted a couple specific, real world example files to [email protected]. It is helpful to collect test cases. If you email us, please also include a link to this forum thread.

[mircohering]

Thanks Aaron will do.

I have to scrape some of the content but will send you a couple of examples.
Hopefully this helps for a future enhancement.