Introduction

The Developer has a Merge View feature accessible from the View pulldown menu. Merge View allows helps you manager components between applications.

Main Features

Merge View simplifies a number of tasks:

Copying components between applications.

Select the application you want to copy components from and Merge View will list components in that application. Copy one or several components at a time.

Merging components from one application to another.

Select the remote application from which you want to merge (copy) components to your local application. Merge View will list components in the remote application and components that exist in both applications (conflicting components). Conflicting components are compared between the local and remote applications. The conflicting components are either identical or different (in which case Merge View attempts to display properties that are different).

Managing common components.

In the Developer open the application using the common components. From Merge View, select the application where the common components "live". Merge View will list the common components, display which components have been used and display which ones might be out-of-date.

Note. If you use common components across applications, see Working with Packages for more relevant features.

Managing versions.

Merge View makes it easy to analyze versions to make sure they do not contain unnecessary components (components that are identical or similar between the base and version). Merge View is also useful to merge version functionality into a base application. Open the base application in the Developer and select the version from Merge View.

Tools

When Merge View encounters a conflicting component (component that exists in both applications), options are provide to;

• Copy a component from the remote application to the local application (Use Remote).
• Copy the local component to the remote application (Use Local).
• Delete the component from the local application.
• Delete the component from the remote application.

If you are doing a major merge project, you can save the components listing to a file. This makes it quicker to reopen the components list at a later stage to continue merge work. You can also use the external XML file to perform your own analyses.

Warnings and Limitations

Merge View is a very powerful tool making it easy to corrupt applications if you are not careful.

Versions are treated as standalone applications (without reference to their base). Therefore while Merge View might suggest that a component does not exist in the version, it might be in the base. This could be relevant when comparing two versions or a version and an application different from its base.

When deleting components, make sure you realize from which application you are deleting.

As with most tools in the Developer, Merge View uses a combination of Filters and Max Hits to speed up performance. Depending on your case, you will need to specify filters and adjust the max hits to suite your job.

Merge View is not able to display detailed differences in properties between complex components (table layouts, screens etc), but it will note that there is a difference. For example two screens with different field ordering are treated as completely different screens.

Most frequently it is better to open the larger application in the Developer and the smaller application in Merge View. This depends however on the task at hand.

For performance reasons, the components list does not automatically refresh. Reselect the component type in the tree view to refresh the components list.