improve comparison tool

[kakoeh]

Currently the compare command accepts a list of pdx-files and a list of variants as input arguments.
It would be nice to have an optional input argument where a folder with multiple pdx files can be specified.

Idea:

• provide folder with multiple pdx files as argument
• load all pdx files in folder, sort them alphabetically, compare databases pairwise

When multiple pdx files are analyzed, a summary of all changes might be helpful

Idea:

• calculate metrics (number of added services, number of changed services, number of removed services, total number of services per ecu variant, ...)
• display metrics graphically

The results of the comparison are displayed in the terminal. For further use, a json export might be nice.

Idea:

• write results of comparison in json structure
• use links to refer to dignostic services / objects if changes have already been detected (e.g. in another ecu variant / diagnostic layer)

Katja Köhler <katja.koehler@mercedes-benz.com>, on behalf of MBition GmbH.
Provider Information

[vinothk-master]

Hi @kakoeh
Can I work on this enhancement?
Thanks
Vinoth

[kakoeh]

Hi @vinothk-master,
Sure, we'd appreciate your contribution.

[vinothk-master]

Hi @kakoeh
I am working on this enhancement and have some queries. As per the description,

calculate metrics (number of added services, number of changed services, number of removed services, total number of services per ecu variant, ...)
display metrics graphically

should I add extra column for number of added services, number of changed services and so on ?

Could you please provide me your suggestions.

Currently the table looks like as below,

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name ┃ Variant Type ┃ Number of Services ┃ Number of DOPs ┃ Number of communication parameters ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ somersault_assiduous │ ECU-VARIANT │ 9 │ 12 │ 0 │

Thanks
Vinoth Kannan

[kakoeh]

Hi @vinothk-master,
I'd suggest to introduce a new table with change metrics such as the number of added or deleted services.

The table that is currently generated, provides an overview of selected characteristics (variant type, number of services, number of DOPs, number of communication parameters) of different diagnostic layers within one file. When multiple files are compared, the benefit of this contribution and of a separate table would be to display the identified changes clearly and concisely.

From my point of view, such table could be structured as follows:

[vinothk-master]

Hi @kakoeh

Thanks for the input!

I have made the changes, could you please help me verify my table below?

I have used some sample PDX files.

[kakoeh]

Hi @vinothk-master,
thank you for your work and time.

Regarding the table, I wouldn't specify the changes per diagnostic layer. As Variant and Diag Layer refer to the same object, the number of added, changed or deleted variants can be aggregated per file (database) but not per diagnostic layer. Therefore, I would add up the number of added, deleted and changed variants as well as services for each comparison of two files, e.g.:

However, printing change metrics for each diagnostic layer (if existing) might be instructive as well. In this case, I would print a table such as:

[vinothk-master]

Hi @vinothk-master, thank you for your work and time.

Regarding the table, I wouldn't specify the changes per diagnostic layer. As Variant and Diag Layer refer to the same object, the number of added, changed or deleted variants can be aggregated per file (database) but not per diagnostic layer. Therefore, I would add up the number of added, deleted and changed variants as well as services for each comparison of two files, e.g.:

However, printing change metrics for each diagnostic layer (if existing) might be instructive as well. In this case, I would print a table such as:

Hi @kakoeh,

I tried making the changes; however, rich print doesn't support merge cells. May I know the way you have implemented the merge cells, please?

Below is my implementation,

Thanks
Vinoth Kannan

[kakoeh]

Hi @vinothk-master,
sorry I was not aware that rich tables don't allow colspan / rowspan attributes. In that case, I'd use "Variants Added", "Variants Deleted", "Variants Changed", etc. as you implemented before.

However, I'd split your table into two different ones, one with metrics of the file comparison and one with the metrics per diagnostic layer. Analogous to the logic for comparing databases when the argument -db is given, you could use the existing function compare_databases and print_database_changes / print_dl_changes. The output could then look somehow like this: