|
The Diff treats
connection parameters and other comparison-specific settings as a
'project' or 'document' that can be saved to a file and re-opened
later. Such comparison
document can also be specified at
startup in the
command line, along with various
command-line parameters. The default file extension for comparison
documents is .ASQ
and the Diff
registers itself during its installation as the default application
to open .ASQ
files.
  All usual operations with
comparison documents (New/Open/Save/SaveAs) can be found, not
surprisingly, in the Diff's File
menu. The
New, Open and Save commands are also available via toolbar
buttons.
The Open/Save/Save
As commands work as usual
and hardly need any explanation, but the New
command does.
In previous versions, the New
Comparison simply displayed the
connection panel and did nothing else. In this version, when you
choose "New comparison", you are presented with a dialog box asking
if you want to clear the current comparison settings first. If you
answer "No", the connection panel with the current connection
parameters gets displayed, just like before. If you answer "Yes",
the current comparison is closed and all current project
information cleared. This is more like the classic "New document"
command.
The following information
is saved in an .ASQ file:
|
·
|
Connection strings for
each of the 2 databases being compared (or a single connection
string if there is just one database being explored). The
password(s) will or will not be saved with the connection string(s)
depending on the "Allow saving password" checkbox in the connection
dialog (see the
note below). |
|
·
|
Any
schema-reading filters, telling the Diff to ignore certain schema
objects when reading these particular database(s).
[As of
version 1.95, no such filters are implemented
yet].
|
|
·
|
A list of
renaming links, if any such links exist. You can use renaming
commands to tell the Diff that, for example, table
Buyers
in the first
database is equivalent and should be compared to table
Customers
in the second
one, etc. Obviously, such associations must not disappear when you
re-compare the databases, so they are kept with the
project. |
|
·
|
The
current layout of the schema tree. The Diff remembers which
branches of the tree were expanded and which were collapsed, it
also keeps the last selected item. When you re-load the comparison,
the schema tree will look much the same as it looked when you were
last saving the project.
|
|
·
|
Any
DataDiff settings specific to these two databases (such as whether
the server-side scripting should be used).
|
|
·
|
Complete
set of table-wise and column-wise DataDiff settings for each pair
of tables you have compared in DataDiff. This includes any filter
conditions, options, lists of ignored and key columns, and so
on.
|
Note
on passwords: If you use SQL
Server-level authorization, and you want to re-run the comparison
later without having to enter the password every time, you can tell
the Diff to save password(s) with the comparison project.
Obviously, this
is a security risk, so the program will ask
you for confirmation before saving. Although the Diff doesn't keep
the password in plain-text, it doesn't use a secure encryption
either, instead applying a simple garbling algorithm. Moreover,
even without un-garbling the password, anybody can open an .ASQ
file on any machine with AdeptSQL Diff and therefore get access to
your valuable databases.
Therefore, it may be much
safer to either use Windows-level authorization for your databases
(so that no passwords ever need be saved or specified at all), or
not to save the password with a comparison project.
Comparison
document format. An AdeptSQL Diff
comparison document is a text file similar to an .INI file. Major
pieces of information (listed above) are [Sections]
within this
file, individual options are "Name=Value"
lines under their respective section headers. There should be no
need for you to edit the .ASQ files manually, so no detailed
description of the format is provided here. However, in an unlikely
case you do need such information, it should be easy to figure out
all details by studying a sample .ASQ file.
|
