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There has long been a requirement, where we need to compare 2 Smartform versions.
In SAP there is no feature for this, there are no past versions maintained and also certainly no
remote comparison.
I was faced with such a task too. There were multiple complex smartforms and due to
multiple activities and phases of my project working simultaneously, it was very difficult to
trace what went wrong and definitely made it a lot of effort to maintain and revert changes in
case of any issues.
Thus began my journey down the lane on how to overcome this problem.
My initial research "Google" shed no fruitful results. All I got was it is not possible in SAP to
compare the smartforms and we will need to download the XML files and save locally in
order to do version management.
And in case we need to compare, we will need to upload and create a temporary version and
then compare each window and element.
Well, to me it did not make a lot of sense. Since it would be way easier to create new in a lot
of cases and yes, I believe that is what must have been done in most cases.
I noticed that always on Download and XML file is generated and this remains more or less
of a similar structure.
There are tags which we can traverse and identify to compare the smartforms.
And also the entire data in the smartform is present in the XML.
So, why not automate this and voila now I have a working program to compare smartforms.
This is currently a working version with a known bug that it can only compare smartforms
upto a certain size. The reason is that currently we are not able to process the complete string
provided by the XML in the file. Other than that this can be used to compare smartforms.
1. Download and Maintain the XMLs of the smartform before making any change. This will
act as your repository of version management. Alternatively an SVN can be used for this
purpose
2. Execute the program and provide the two XML files that you want to compare.
Also all are welcome to collaborate on the source code and help in the development of a
comprehensive tool.
5. Bug fixes
Hope this post proves useful to all who are in need for a way to compare smartforms.