Delta is indispensable when you need to compare LotusScript code, as I described in the previous section. It's great at determining the differences in fields between two forms. Delta lets you know what fields have been added to or removed from a form, and what changes have been made to individual fields on that form. You can also view two versions of a form side by side. Try doing that in Domino Designer!

Similarly, Delta is also very effective at determining view changes, particularly column definition changes. Delta also works very well with CIAO! If you also use CIAO for Notes source code control, you can use Delta to compare a design element with previous versions that have been checked into CIAO.

The Delta report option is a good audit tool. It offers indispensable proof of what has been changed, and can be saved for future reference. Finally, the "Delta of 2 documents" action is a nice add-on feature that's very useful for comparing a replication conflict with its parent document.

Product drawbacks
There are several aspects of Teamstudio Delta I feel could be improved:

Handling of Javascript code
I had a difficult time using Delta to compare changes made to actions that contained JavaScript. While Delta does check for changes made to JavaScript code, it doesn't report on the action events that contain the code as belonging to the action. For example, the "Event-On click", "Blob Part", "Client event-On click", and "Client Blob Part" events are reported as belonging to the form, not the action that contains them, as you can see in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Comparing JavaScript actions can be tricky. Roll over picture for a larger image.

As a result, when I use the "Hide identical objects" option, I can't tell which action these items belong to. Analyzer reports JavaScript actions properly.

No ability to control handling of white space or capitalization
Delta sometimes considers simple white space differences as relevant. For example, Delta will consider these two statements as being different:

Also, there's no way to ignore capitalization. So, the following will also show up as different:

Since LotusScript and the formula language aren't case sensitive, the product would be greatly improved if users had the ability to configure Delta to ignore either of these differences.

Handling of outlines
Delta is pretty much useless when comparing outline changes. For some reason, Delta returns what looks like a machine code dump for an outline. In contrast, Analyzer returns outline data accurately. I spoke with customer support about this issue, and the machine code returned by Delta is what is actually returned by the Notes API. When Analyzer reports on an outline, it's performing an approximation (or best guess) as to what the machine code represents. From my perspective, it makes more sense for Delta to perform the same approximation that Analyzer does, rather than returning machine code, which is useless.