System Architect provides IBM Rational Publishing Engine report that gathers and generates information across the different encyclopedias and workspaces.

The report helps you compare “Application” definitions across encyclopedias and workspaces, showing the Application property differences in color, and added or deleted definitions in separate sections. The base and target encyclopedias or workspaces have to be specified as parameters.

Along with application properties, it also prints the list of referenced definitions, for example a list of Application Interfaces.

The report also provides a sample of how to operate simple arithmetic on property values; it calculates and prints the total cost for each application derived by the formula Total Cost = Perpetual License Cost (A) + Yearly Maintenance Cost (B) + Yearly Rental Cost (C) + Build Cost (D). Note that (A), (B), (C) and (D) are text fields in System Architect but implicitly expect numeric values, while for the computation in this report the numeric values are mandatory.

The report is installed in:

Its name is Application Comparison.dta.

As usual, the Rational Publishing Engine features concurrent document generation to multiple formats from the single template. You can generate Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, HTML, and XSL reports.

A page from a sample report is shown below, where the changed property values are displayed in red. For example, the value for the Perpetual License Cost (A) changed from 150 in the SamplesWS/Current State column to 0 in the SamplesWS/Future State column.