cpeediff

CpeeDiff is an advanced diff tool for business process models conforming to the CPEE notation. This project is part of my bachelor's thesis at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

Prerequisites

• Linux
• Node.js 16.x.x

Although not explicitly tested, CpeeDiff should also work with Node.js 15.x.x.

Installation

To install globally and as a command line utility, run npm install -g cpeediff (root user privileges may be necessary). To verify that the symbolic link to the main.js file has been created, run cpeediff --help.

If you want to use CpeeDiff for a single project only, navigate to your project folder and run npm install cpeediff.

If you want to install from source, clone this repository, navigate to it, and run npm install. This should place all the necessary dependencies in the node_modules directory.

Usage

From the command line

• cpeediff --help for the list of available subcommands.
• cpediff <command> --help for the list of available options for a subcommand.

Currently, the following subcommands are available:

• diff <old> <new>: Find differences between two CPEE process trees given as XML documents. The diff is given as a sequence of edit operations encoded in an XML document.
• patch <old> [editScript]: Apply an edit script produced by CpeeDiff to a CPEE process tree. The given tree must be identical to the tree that was used to generate the edit script.
• merge <base> <branch1> <branch2>: Perform a three-way merge with the given process trees.
• eval <suite>: Run the automated evaluation framework with the selected test suite.

By default, output XML documents are unformatted and (nearly) impossible to navigate for humans. To pretty-print XML output, use the --pretty option.

As a module

CpeeDiff can only be imported as an ES6 module and will not function with require() syntax.

import {Preprocessor} from 'cpeediff/src/io/Preprocessor.js'
import {CpeeDiff} from 'cpeediff/src/diff/CpeeDiff.js'
import {DiffConfig} from 'cpeediff/src/config/DiffConfig.js'

// Parse process models
const parser = new Preprocessor();
const oldTree = parser.fromFile('old.xml');
const newTree = parser.fromFile('new.xml');

// Express differences as edit script
const differ = new CpeeDiff();
const editScript = differ.diff(oldTree, newTree);

// Enable prettier XML formatting
DiffConfig.PRETTY_XML = true;

// Output as XML document
console.log(editScript.toXmlString());

More documentation is available here.

References

Made with the help of the following npm modules (all licensed under MIT):

• yargs to parse command line arguments.
• xmldom for access to XML DOM functions and XML (de-)serialization.
• murmur-32 for string hashing.
• vkbeautify to pretty-print XML documents.
• markdown-table to format the output of the evaluation framework.

For an overview of literature that informed the algorithm design, please consult the bachelor's thesis.