The Source Code Comparator › Overview

Overview

CA Endevor/DB's Source Code Comparator is designed to identify changes to individual lines of code modified between one version of a system and another. Typically, the Comparator is employed as a troubleshooting aid, or as a means of identifying the changes that an installation has made to tailor a vendor-supplied application system. It is an invaluable tool when applying maintenance releases of vendor software or when combining parallel development versions. In these cases, the Promotion Support Facilities, in conjunction with the CCDB Change Log, identify and extract the affected entities, while the Comparator identifies the exact areas within those entities that have changed.

The Source Code Comparator can be executed in one of two modes:

• Stand-alone mode

  Any two sequential files with a record length of between 4 and 256 bytes (fixed or variable) can be compared with the stand-alone CA Endevor/DB utility NDVRCOMP.

• Migration mode

  In migration mode, the standard output files from a NDVRDLVR run (See Chapter 8) is compared with the target dictionary. The CA Endevor/DB utility program NDVRDCMP:

  • Automatically parses the input files and identifies the entities contained therein;
  • Dynamically invokes IDD to extract the corresponding entities from the target dictionary;
  • Internally invokes the source statement comparator for each entity;
  • Index and summarize the results by entity name and type in a control report.

Facilities also exist to limit the compare to entities of specific types in a single execution. For example, only ELEMENTs and RECORDs might be singled out for comparison even though the input files contain entities of all types. Sample JCL for the execution of the compare in migration mode is contained on the CA Endevor/DB installation media.