In our still very document/paper based industry, almost every process requires a storable/printable report.
It's great to have a visual improvement over the old document content history report, but as long as it's not storable as PDF it's difficult to use for the same purposes.
Our user has the same request. A document avoids to return in the tool to see the difference between an old and new document version for example.
When you submit a new specification to an external or an internal, the comparaison between the old and new version always offers a better understanding of the document (and you don't want to give Integrity access to an external).
Our company also has these requirements. We need exportable diff results for reviews and similar process steps, which are also done by users without access to Integrity. Therefore, these results should also be available in standard formats such as Excel, Word and PDF.
What about the reports? PTC already provided the inbuild report for listing out the difference in content right?
We shall have the customized report recipes in order to add our own attributes. The generated HTML file contains difference between two revisions of the document. We shall also store the document as PDF via some Firefox or Chrome plugins.
I agree, Excel based difference report will be flexible, but my point is we already have HTML based report that resolves the purpose of reviewing or validating new entries.
Reporting could be a good idea, if the reporting itself would not be such a mess. Our users often come with the desire to be able to quickly and flexibly redirect certain content as a report. Then they see the recipes that are available, then they see how cumbersome and inflexible these recipes are to use, and at the latest when they see how inflexible you are, when you want to change or create new recipes, they go and never come back.
Yes, we need that as well. Not everyone here in the company is using Integrity. We have to provide differences between to document revision as documents to some departments. The differences report is to simple and not configurable (not possible to check other fields?). A mature was of exporting the information from the "View Differences" function would be good.
Our company also has these requirements. We need exportable diff results for external reviews and e.g. change approval process steps, which are also done by users without access to Integrity.
Therefore, these results should also be available in external formats (HTML, PDF).
The already available Diff Report generated by the Gateway on (Re)-Import would be an appropriate format to start with.
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Regarding the old report based comparison I share @JensN. thoughts. We mostly disliked for 3 points:
- terrible performance with larger documents
- the differences highlighting in text using color codes, might conflict this actual formated text content (it is more or less impossible to customize this behavior)
- it is not possible to show a "show only differences" report (as far as I know)
The new difference view is a huge improvement in usability and visual presentation, although it also has some performance issues and customizing limitations (e.g. you cannot deselect the TEXT field and compare only the specified "additional fields").
