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Comparing documents with w:hyperlinks that differ on w:history attribute causes confusing diff

Aspose.Words Product Family
,
#1

(Related: https://forum.aspose.com/t/comparing-documents-explodes-w-hyperlinks-into-sequence-of-w-fldchars/241646.)

The left and right documents contain only a hyperlink and are identical except for the presence of the w:history attribute. This attribute causes document comparison to show the hyperlink as being deleted, and then immediately re-added. The deleted and re-added hyperlinks are not identical: one has the \h switch, and the other does not.

My understanding is that \h is a display-formatting flag, so the deletion/re-addition isn’t even representing the change in attribute properly. (But please correct me if I’m wrong here.)

Desired result: correctly represent the change by deleting/inserting w:hyperlinks (as in the issue linked above). Acceptable but less desired result: don’t generate an insertion/deletion if it can’t/doesn’t represent the change that actually happened to the w:hyperlink.

Java, 22.1.

right.docx (11.1 KB)
left.docx (11.1 KB)
compared.docx (10.8 KB)

Filed internally as #8479.

#2

@epaulet-society

The history attribute as per specification

The history attribute value of true specifies that the target of the current hyperlink must be added to a list of visited hyperlinks when invoked within the document.

So, it cannot be said that this is a formatting attribute.

As far as I see the comparison using MS Word

Sub CompareDocument()
  ActiveDocument.Compare Name:="right.docx", _
  CompareTarget:=wdCompareTargetNew
end sub

gives a completely identical result, including converting w:hyperlink to HYPERLINK field with \h attribute. The policy of Aspose.Words is the mimics MS Word behavior. Therefore, in this case, we do not see any inconsistencies.

#3

Ah, I also see that Word behaves the same, so I understand why you would not want to make the change. I’ll work around it on my own end.

#4

@epaulet-society We apologize for the inconvenience, but such a fix may cause complaints from our other customers who expect behavior similar to MS Word.