Compare and Synchronize

Compare and Synchronize provides a mechanism for moving the latest structural changes from a source model to a target model. Both models must be structurally compatible.

In your application development lifecycle, you might use Compare and Synchronize to:

• Move changes from a development model (in standard mode) to a test model (in deployed mode)
• Move tested changes from a test model to a production model (both in deployed mode)
• Move changes from a development model (in standard mode) straight to a production model (in deployed mode)

A Compare and Synchronize operation never overwrites any production data in the target model. Remember to always store operational data in production lists.

Synchronization events are recorded in the change history of a model. To ensure the target model remains valid, the order in which synchronization events occur varies and depends on what you synchronize.

You can think of Compare and Synchronize as a three-stage process.

1. You choose the target and source models you want to compare.
   • The target is the model you want to compare the source model against, or move changes to.
   • The source is the model you want to compare with the target model, and move changes from.
2. You choose a revision tag on the source model to compare against the latest revision of the target model. Using the source revision tag as the basis for the comparison, this generates a high-level summary of the net difference between the two models’ structural information. If you want a comprehensive summary of the settings and model components that have been added and modified in the source model, you can download a comparison report as a tab-delimited text (.txt) file.
3. If you go ahead and sync, all changes are moved from the source model to the target model. If the sync completes successfully, both the source and target model are at the same revision. A new revision tag is created in the target model.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, see Compare and Synchronize changes.