This section describes the basic understanding you need in order to work with the Delta Engine.
All programming languages must follow a given set of syntax rules to be compiled. DE identifies changes between files based on their semantic differences, ignoring white space and case sensitivity.
The changes are display in an xml delta file that can be used to semantically merge them into a third version of the same file.
Changes are also available in an html report file for review of identified changes.
The Delta Engine comes with a set of programming language parsers and a default setup of file extensions handled by each parser. A user can thus add file extensions to a parser or even switch parser for a specific file extension. DE has parsers for languages such as Java, PL/SQL, C#, etc. What about c#? Should Centura SAL and ASP even be mentioned anymore?
A delta is the difference between two versions of a file. Let’s say R&D fixes a bug and thus creates a new version of a particular file. We can now use the DeltaEngine to extract the changes (delta) between the two file versions. This delta will contain one bug fix.
If we extract the differences between the 12.0.0 version of a file in the Order component and the same file in Order 13.0.0 we will get a delta containing all the new functionality in the file.