Apex Application Alterations

Here is a tidbit I noticed that may be useful to someone.

Sometimes there comes a need to compare two applications to determine differences. Typically, this would be comparing an older version of the same application to see what has been changed (and try to determine why!)

Doing this via a text comparison of the export is tough. A simple compare of text files in TextPad gave me 5000 lines of differences for a copy of an application where I made one change! This would of course be due to the differences in IDs for all the objects. Perhaps an expert in text comparison tools may suggest an alternative there.

The Application Express builder provides a comparison tool for you. Once you have one of the applications selected, click on the Application Reports link in the Task List.

One set of application reports is "Cross Application"


There are two comparison reports, as opposed to the attribute listings:


Now this is an output of differences between my two applications, one was a copy where I made an attribute change of an item in a form.

The Show Details checkbox option does little to illustrate the difference Apex found, but the report can be a good starting point to debugging and locating a problem you may have.

In this case the Application Attribute difference is obvious - the application alias would have changed.
Page 7 relates to my change, so it seems to be highlighting some difference in the page itself, in addition to the item I modified. If the algorithm is using some form of checksum to make the comparison, this is not exceptional.
I didn't look into the page 35, where there is a blob displayed, nor the page templates.

If this is a task you may perform semi-regularly, they may be anomalies/expected behaviour you come to expect from the comparison and learn what is safer to ignore.