Starting a merge operation

You can merge specific elements listed in the browser.

Procedure

  1. Choose Edit > Start merge or click the Start Merge Start Merge button button.
  2. If you are working with a base‑aware comparison (Results displayed for compare of three units), IBM Rational Rhapsody DiffMerge identifies all Trivial versus non-trivial differences and displays a window asking if you want to merge all trivial differences automatically. You can select to not display this window again if you always handle trivial differences in the same manner.
  3. Navigate to differences using the difference navigation buttons:
    • First Difference First Difference button
    • Next Difference Next Difference button
    • Previous Difference Previous Difference button
    • Last Difference Last Difference button
  4. To restrict the view to only the conflicting items for either comparison, choose View > View Conflicts.
  5. For each element that exists on both sides of the comparison, determine whether you want to execute these operations:
    1. Take the element from the left or right along with its descendants (aggregates and associations which are nested elements in the browser). Right-click the element in the browser and select Take from Right or Take from Left.
    2. In addition, you can optionally take a value for a particular attribute for the element from the left or from the right (or from the base when doing a base‑aware comparison). This choice might be done when you have chosen to take an element from the left in Step 5.a, but for the value for a particular attribute, you prefer to take the right side.
      Note: You might also follow this step for any descendants of the element you chose in Step 5.a.
    3. Alternatively, if the particular attribute you want to change is a textual attribute, such as code and description, you could right-click it on the Attributes pane and select Merge Text to open the external textual diff/merge tool (cleardiffmrg by default). For more information about the ability for Rational Rhapsody DiffMerge to automatically resolve textual differences, see the description for the BaseAwareAutoMergeableAttributes preference and the ItsBody value in TextDiffMerge preferences category.
  6. Choose Edit > Take from left or Take from right to select a difference that you want to merge. Or the click the Take from Left button Take from Left button to add the element from the left unit to the right unit or the Take from Right button Take from Right button to add the element from the right unit to the left unit. These buttons operate on the selected element, as well as all of its nested elements.
  7. If you are using a base‑aware comparison for the merge, you can scroll through any non‑trivial difference using the Next non-trivial difference button Next non-trivial difference button or Previous non‑trivial difference button Previous non-trivial difference button when you want to make a merge decision.
  8. If you want to include or exclude an element manually, right-click the element and select Include from merge or Exclude from merge.
  9. Once a difference is resolved for either type of comparison, the difference arrow or arrows on the browser icon turn gray. Therefore, all gray items are not going to be displayed in an Undecided view of the merged elements; see Making merge decisions.
    Before and after merge

Results

Note: You cannot exclude from the merge any elements that are in both the left and the right units. See Rules for merging from a two-unit comparison.

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