Generating Reports from Command Line

 

 

Since Ellié Computing Merge 1.2, we introduced a new reporting feature. This feature is available from both console and graphical interface.

The report generation from the command line is particularly useful to use Merge as a sub-product or a tool for your source code quality works.

Syntax:
ecmerge-cli.exe -O<export-file> -X<format> [-E] -x<sub-format> [<ancestor-file|ancestor-folder>] <file1|folder1> <file2|folder2>
NB: under linux the command starts with ecmerge --cli rather than ecmerge-cli.exe

This command will create a report  in the file <export-file> of given <format> (none, unixpatch, html or xml) for the given input files.
-E forces embedding of sub-reports of folders (and to use the same export format as well).
-x set the format for the files report (in the context of folders).

You can also set some of the comparison options with various switches and options and add --factory switch to use factory settings for all the options (comparison and generation) so as to get predictible results on any computer.

Information You may have noticed -Xnone... to produce no report at all. This is typically interesting when you want to generate the report by yourself with the scripting engine (ECMerge contains a full ECMAScript engine and you have access to a document object model for any type of document).

Though you can generate report using only command line arguments, it is not the most practical way. You can use three major methods to get all the settings set according your wishes:

With both of these methods you can use all the options box (including the report generation boxes using the Apply button), the only mandatory options are then the main report format (-X) and the location for the report file (-O).

In order to ease the use of these feature, the Reports dialog box has a Export / Copy Command Line to Clipboard option which will generate the command line to launch to generate exactly the report.

See also: