HTML Compare Report Issue

The other day I ran into a situation where I needed to generate HTML compare reports. When I created the report though, all the support HTML files like the CompareViewer.html file were not generated. At first, I thought there might be a bug that was preventing the HTML compare reports from building. But I dug into the process and found that there was an easy fix. Before we get to that, let’s dig into the HTML compare reports and how App Designer builds them.

HTML compare reports are great for sharing with users who don’t have App Designer access. You can drop the HTML reports on a share and anyone you want to can view the reports. To view the reports, you open CompareViewer.html and you see all the information in the report. But if some of the HTML support files are missing, the reports won’t work.

Support Files

There are some base HTML, CSS and JavaScript files to support the HTML reports:

• CompareViewer.html – Main HTML file. Open this one to view HTML Compare Reports.
• projectHeader.html
• projectList.html
• projectList.xml – Contains all the HTML compare report projects in the directory.
• projectList.xsl
• source* – Support HTML, CSS, JS, images
• projectName* – If you ran more than one HTML compare report to the same directory, each project will have it’s own folder. Each project folder will have any entry in the projectList.xml file.

UPGCOMPVIEWER Folder

In your PeopleTools client folder, you need to make sure the setupUPGCOMPVIEWER folder has the support files. When you generate the HTML compare reports, App Designer drops the HTML files into your output folder. Then, App Designer will add in your project and compare data to the output folder.

The UPGCOMPVIEWER folder has two sub directories:

• report_files – The main HTML compare report files.
• project_files – Used for each project in the HTML compare report.

If you wanted to customize your compare report output, you can make the HTML, CSS or image changes there.

Output Folder

You can’t change the output folder for compare reports in the Report Options tab (you should be able to though…). To change the output path, go to “Tools > Options > General” and change the “Report Output Directory”.

PeopleTools Client Install

If you haven’t figured it out yet, my problem was that the UPGCOMPVIEWER folder didn’t exist in the setup folder. I used the PeopleTools client install but it didn’t include the UPGCOMPVIEWER folder and files.

To make sure, I did a fresh client install with 8.53.24, 8.54.16 and 8.55.01. The 8.53 client installs did not contain the folder. The latest 8.54 and 8.55 client installers did include UPGCOMPVIWER in the setup folder.