External Comparisson tool

[thowa]

Hi,

I would like to know if it is possible to setup a 3rd Party Tool for comparisson of certain file types.

In my special case I would like to compare folders containing TestStand-Sequence files.
If I have identified a difference in such file I would like to use a 3rd party tool to compare those 2 files rather than using the Beyond Compare File Comparisson.

The files I'm talking about are used with the TestStand from National Instruments. They have the extension .seq. Depending on the setting in TestStand the sequence file can either be ASCII text or binary.
Even if they are in ASCII format, comparing with a normal Text-Tool is not suffitien, because they have to interpreted in a very special case.

The TestStand Sequence Editor allows to Compare two Sequence files in much better way than any Text-based tool.

Many thanks,
Thorsten

[Zoë]

Hi Thorsten,

There are two ways that you can do this, depending on your programming expertise and control over the other comparison utility:

1) Set up an "Open With" command. Open with commands can be set up in the Options dialog and then add entries under the "Open With" submenu. You'll have to use "Open With" instead of "Open"/[Enter] to launch the comparison, and it won't report the results back to BC, but it's easy to do and all it requires is that your other utility accept a pair of filenames on the command line.

2) Wrap the utility in a BC viewer plugin. These can use the same API that BC2 used for all of its viewers. You have to know how to program in Delphi or C++/MFC to do this, but its well integrated. It supports launching the comparison directly from the directory compare, doing rules-based comparisons, and getting the results back. We have Delphi and MFC sample code available for download.