BC3 Roadmap

[Rob]

One of the best things that I love about BC is the frequent updates, fixes, enhancements, etc.

Along these lines, I'm wondering what you guys have planned for BC 3.1, is it currently in the works? Can you give us an idea about what's in store?

Thanks and keep up the great work!

[Zoë]

Hi Rob,

3.1 is going to include official French and German translations and initial support for editing in the data compare. Most of the other improvements/tweaks/fixes we've been working on have already gone out in a 3.0.x release.

[ojcitt]

Hi,

Is there an updated roadmap for 3.3 or 4.0? It would help me to prioritize offline scripts for various formats if I knew what features were in the pipeline.

Thanks,
ojc

[Aaron]

Hello,

We do not have a published roadmap for BC3.3 or 4.0. Were there any specific features you were looking for?

[ojcitt]

features

Yes, there are. I sent an email to the support address on Feb 15, but here's a summary:

1) Association of data formats with a definable file format, allowing folder compare sessions to handle multiple data formats based on their extensions.
2) The ability to specify a fixed number of lines at the top of a delimited data file to be skipped, and to specify that headers appear on, say, line 3, but that lines 4-5 should be skipped before parsing the remainder as a data file.
3.) The ability to set an acceptable relative numeric tolerance on individual columns in a data comparison. That is, column 5 may be allowed to differ by up to 2% of the value on the left hand side.
4.) The ability to handle older fixed format (or Fortran list-directed format) text files as a data format. I realize I can do this now in a pre-diff script, but it'd be nice to have an interface for setting the field widths directly).
5.) There are other tricks that might be interesting in data compare, for instance looking at two dependent variables when the independent variables cover overlapping ranges but with different resolutions or sample points, etc.
6.) Some files are blocks of delimited data separated by either text or other patterns, so it would be cool to be able to define those kinds of higher-level patterns. In other words, split a text file into a group of data files based on a regular expression. This is also doable in a pre-process, but if the concepts of text files and data files were more fluid, it might be possible.

Anyway, thanks for the quick response, and keep up the excellent work.

[Chris]

We also discussed this by email, but for anyone following this post:

Items 1-3 are on the wish list for a future version of BC.

Items 4-6 sound useful, but are more complicated so we can't make any guarantees about them for future versions.