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XPP 9.1 - XPPCOMPARE - HEADS UP

John Hoffman

Heads up if your site is upgrading from XPP 8.4 to XPP 9.1 and uses xppcompare to automate the tracing of editorial traces between different versions of documents.

Publishers in the tax, legal, mil-spec, financial, pharmaceutical and a couple of other subject areas publish documents with change bars and revision markup to show what has changed between versions of a document.

So, if you publish some of this stuff, and if you use xppcompare,  put some extra time in your release schedule to check out how the new, upgraded xppcompare process works in your environment. It will probably work pretty good, but do be sure to plan check it out.

There are changes to the comparator and the “.dxp pipeline”, which, in basic terms, is a set of transformations and java jars that prep and tweak the files during the compare process. These are very useful! But if you have customized them, you may need to adjust them post upgrade.

Also, you may want to adjust your batch workflow code to fire the new command line option that lets you say that you want to run the older or newer comparator.

Basically, all is manageable, but do plan some extra time to evaluate and, if needed, tweak your code for the comparison phase of XPP processing.

Hopefully, this will help save some kindred site out a bit of time.
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  • Thank you John for this.
    Yes the xmldiff engine that xppcompare is using has been updated from V6.2 to V7.
    But I assumed that as by default it runs in "V6.2" mode the differences would be minimal.
    (presuming you did not customized anything)
    Or is your experience different?
  • in reply to Bart Terryn

    John can fill in the details, but I believe that he is using a custom .dxp file and thus needed to tweak this file based on the new version of the delivered  xppcompare_default.dxp file (used for default V6.2 pipeline comparator - which gives closest result to prior behavior).

    The new xppcompare_s9.dxp delivered file is used when using the V7.0 S9 pipeline comparator (i.e. when "-type -s9" option is specified - see doc or 'xyhelp xppcompare'). So if you are going to try or use the S9 pipeline comparator, you would need to pattern any customer .dxp file on the xppcompare_s9.dxp file.

    According to my colleague Tony Wilmot, there were changes to the xppcompare_default.dxp so that it would work with the new version of the DeltaXML engine. For example, the DOCTYPE extension needed to ensure DeltaXML looks in the right place for the files and some of the filter class names were modified to include "v62" to point to the older version filters.

    Jonathan Dagresta
    RWS Group/    XPP Development

  • in reply to Jonathan Dagresta

    Just an addendum to my comment. The new -type option for xppcompare was mentioned in the Release Notes and it is documented in the on-line help file ('xyhelp xppcompare').

    But it looks to me like we missed updating the documentation for the new option, namely the XyDiff and XPP Compare manual and the Command Line Utilities manual (xppcompare entry).

    We need to fix that oversight.  [8-|]  [:$]

    Jonathan Dagresta
    RWS Group/    XPP Development

  • in reply to Jonathan Dagresta
    For sites that use this tool the code change is a consideration to make as part of the overall 9.1 upgrade process.

    Upon our upgrade, all our compare processing failed, and there was no clear trail down which to chase the issue.
    Hence the heads up.

    That the behavior is close to the 8.4 version is positive; but it is not 100 percent the same, and when a business is 100 percent dependent upon its performance, then that business needs to be aware that it needs to open up its schedule and allot some testing time to that phase of production.

    Further, is is yet not clear to us what are supposed to be the benefits between the different versions of the code. We will work to flush that out and we will let you know of any interesting finds.

    I am sure all will work out for the better.