Beyond Compare - Finding number of line differences rather than byte differences when using Folder Compare

Question

So I am using Beyond Compare 4.0.7 and am comparing two folders containing different versions of a Java project. I want to find how many lines have been changed to class files in the newest project.

So I filter by *.class files, view differences where the newer project contains class files that are also newer, and then I expand all and select files. This selects all class files as I expect. Then I go to Actions -> File Compare Report... and I generate a summary. However this summary only shows the byte differences in the files. I want to know the line number differences (preferably just the grand total of lines changed rather than for each class). Is there a setting I am missing?

Answer 1

The Summary report layout reports the number of different lines for each pair of text files. If you want statistics on the number of different lines of text in your project, you should generate a report on the .java source code files, not the .class files of compiled byte code. If you only have access to .class files, you might be able to use a java decompiler to convert the files back to .java to generate a report on the number of different lines.

The Summary report layout doesn't include a total number of lines different, it only reports the number of different lines in each file. If you select Statistics as the report layout, it will include a total at the end of the report. However, Statistics is much less human readable than the Summary report layout.

Adding a total number of lines at the end of the Summary report layout is on the feature wish list for a future version of Beyond Compare.