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Several NDepend users asked our support how to automate showing diff in report. The goal for example, is to list all assemblies/namespaces/types/methods/fields that have been added/changed/removed since the last release. Here are the 3 steps:

Step1: Define the base line

First, define the base line, meaning, the previous versions of the code base against which the comparison will be done. This can be done in VisualNDepend > Project Properties > Analysis > Build Comparison.

Step2: Define the diff rules and activate them

Second, define your own diff CQL rules that match your particular needs. By default, an NDepend project comes with a set of default CQL diff queries. They can be found into the Diff \ Changes \ Evolution > Change Summary CQL default group. Selecting a diff query makes appear the matched diff result in the CQL Query Result panel of VisualNDepend.

However the result of a CQL query cannot be shown in report. Only result of CQL rules can be shown in the report, under the conditions:

• The CQL rule is violated.
• The CQL rule is activated.
• The option Display list of items selected in report must be selected.

Thus, a CQL query needs to be transformed into a rule. This is as simple as adding the prefix WARN IF Count > 0 IN to the query. Notice that we activated the rule + we selected the option Display list of items selected in report:

You need also to make sure that all parent CQL group of your CQL diff rules are also activated.

Step3: Show diff rules in report

Et voila, the list of methods added is listed in the report.

Do More

Actually, before being listed in the report, result of violated CQL rules are stored into an XML file named CQLResult.xml. This file is stored in the output folder of the NDepend project. If you wish to do more customized report you can easily parse the XML results. It is part of the future plans to propose more facilities to harness automatically results.

Finally, while reporting is great, a report will never be as informative as the real-time browsing capabilities offered by VisualNDepend. Since NDepend version 2.12 a Search Panel is proposed to readily explore the diff between 2 snapshots of your application.