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Problem

A Forum reader recently asked:

"Is there a feature in Designer 2.1 to compare two different drivers? I have an old AD driver that I'd like to compare against the "default" 3.5.1 version so I can see what I may need/want to change. I'm thinking I may have to open the policy builder twice (once for each
driver) and do a side-by-side comparison?"

And here are the responses from several Forum participants ...

Solution

Tobias Ljunggren

I have done this by exporting the drivers and then comparing them with kompare (KDE compare utility, there are several others available for Gnome and Windows OS as well).

Aaron Burgemeister

Here are some other good compare utilities on *nix:

- meld (can compare directories and all of their contents... pretty nice little program)
- vimdiff (compare two files side-by-side in vi/vim diff (the class command-line compare)

Another method may be to import one of the two drivers to be compared into a test driver object and then import your other configuration OVER the Designer representation of that same object (or vice versa). At that point Designer's compare feature will work b/c it will think they are supposed to be the same object.

Text-based compare utilities that don't "understand" XML completely should work, as long as the XML output is in the same order for each file being compared. XML doesn't need to be in a certain order to be valid, so that may cause two identical drivers to appear quite different. In the perfect world an XML compare utility would be used, though I don't know of any - and that is where Designer will truly shine.

Will Schneider

I've taken the approach you mention about the dummy driver trick MANY times and it works quite well. The basic steps are:

1. Export the first driver.

2. Import it into a dummy DN driver in the directory.

3. Export the second driver.

4. Overwrite the entire config in Designer by importing it into the config of the dummy DN driver from step 2.

5. Deploy the driver and let Designer do the compare.

It only takes a few minutes after you do it once or twice, and it allows you to see the graphical compares. It would seem like a fairly trivial thing to add to say compare a driver config to [Browse Button] this config file.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.