Comparing Memo Field Text

Since only one text editor window can be open at once, WallsMap by itself doesn't allow a side-by-side comparison of the content of two memo fields, each potentially containing a large amount of text. The program can, however, launch an external utility to perform this function. As the database manager, for example, you might use it to discover exactly what was changed when reviewing a submitted shapefile update. The log file produced by the Compare With Other Layers function will indicate that a memo was edited, but it may only show the first of many changes in a long report. In that situation, assuming WinMerge with the xdocdiff plug-in is installed on your system, I suggest the following steps:

1.Open the update shapefile's memo in the editor, right-click the text and select Save to file from the context menu. Accept the suggested file name in the file save dialog. If this is the first compare operation for the session, you may want to navigate to a suitable folder for temporary files, such as ...\TSS_Data\temp. The last "save to" folder will thereafter be the default.

2.Open the release snapshot version of the memo, right-click the text and select Compare with last saved from the menu. WinMerge should immediately launch (if it's not already open) and display the release version in its left panel and the updated version in its right panel. The text will be colored to clearly show any differences in content, even if the original text modes were different. (If either side is cluttered with the RTF codes of rich text, it probably means the xdocdiff plug-in wasn't enabled via the WinMerge menu.) You can leave WinMerge open for subsequent compare operations, with the program options set to enable line-wrap by default and to not use multiple windows for file comparisons.

3.If you perform edits from within WinMerge, say by moving text from one side to the other, you can save the edited version and then load it back into the update shapefile's memo using the editor's Replace with file option. If the original memo contained rich text, however, you would then need to change the mode back to rich text and restore the formatting. That's because WinMerge can't save the edited result as an RTF file. Once you see what the compare reveals (step 2), the simplest option might be to make any needed fixes via cut-and-paste.

By default, WallsMap will look for an installation of the free and open source WinMerge if you haven't specified a different compare program under Editor | Text editor preferences in the main menu. An alternative is the excellent Beyond Compare 3 (not free, but only $30 as of late 2014). I use it for file and folder comparisons in all contexts except for this particular one. Unfortunately, for comparing memo content it's less useful than WinMerge because it has no option for wrapping the long lines found in reports. You must scroll horizontally to see the specific differences, each paragraph being shown as a single line on the screen.

Another difference is that when Beyond Compare encounters rich text, it converts it to standard text and disables editing. WinMerge, on the other hand, ordinarily shows and let's you edit the raw RTF markup. When reviewing differences in content, however, you'll probably want to see standard word-wrapped text (especially if the text modes of the two memos aren't the same), and for that you'll need to download and install the xdocdiff plug-in that allows WinMerge to compare the plain text versions of RTF files. The plug-in can be set up so that the conversion is automatic.

To try Beyond Compare 3, enter the path to Bcomp.exe in the dialog accessed via the "Options" button in the Text Editor Preferences dialog. Then enter "%1" "%2" for the command arguments.