ListDiff Task

ListDiff

Description

Compares two lists of programming elements and computes differences.

You use ListDiff to list changes in what is considered part of the published API. It only needs the lists of names and signatures. No source or bytecode required.

It writes the list of differences into an XML document that follows the list-diff DTD.

Parameters

Attribute	Description	Required
old	input text file for the old version of the list.	Yes
new	input text file for the new version of the list.	Yes
destfile	where to write the output. If the file does not exist, it is created. If it already exists, its content is overwritten.	Yes
encoding	encoding used for the XML output document. Only useful with `xml`.	No
dtdprefix	prefix of the DTD URL for the XML output document. Only useful with `xml`.	No
indenttext	used for each indentation level in textual and XML output.	No
name	project name for the report.	No
oldlabel	version name for the report. If omitted, the tools will use the value of the `old` parameter instead.	No
newlabel	version name for the report. If omitted, the tools will use the value of the `new` parameter instead.	No
compress	removes redundant entries from the both the `removed` and `added` lists. If a package is in a list, its classes and their features are redundant and can be removed. If a class is in a list, its features are redundant and can be removed.	No

Nested elements

None

Examples

Suppose you generated old.txt and new.txt by hand from your old and new codebases respectively.

To compare the lists in old.txt and new.txt and save the resulting report to diff.xml:

  <listdiff old="old.xml"
            new="new.xml"
            destfile="diff.xml"/>

To add nice labels and convert to HTML:

  <listdiff name="Dependency Finder"
            old="old.xml"
            oldlabel="20020127"
            new="new.xml"
            newlabel="20020711"
            destfile="diff.xml"/>
  <xslt style="${dependencyfinder.home}/etc/ListDiffToHTML.xsl"
        in="diff.xml"
        out="diff.html"/>

To compare the lists in old.txt and new.txt and save the resulting report, with compression, to diff.xml:

  <listdiff old="old.xml"
            new="new.xml"
            destfile="diff.xml"
            compress="yes"/>