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The principle behind the operation of this tool is to "link" 2 Message Tabs together by using a field (called the key path) within the message that identifies the same message in each tab. Once the equivalent message from each tab has been identified, a comparison is performed, and the differences noted. By default, the key path is MSH-10 (Message Control ID) but this can be configured to use any combination of fields within the message.
Linking a 2 tabs is accomplished by clicking the "Bulk Compare" option in the main window and selecting the "Baseline" and "Candidate" message tabs as shown below. (Note the message files need to be first loaded in HL7Spy before they will appear in the Bulk Compare tool.)
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Once the tabs have been selected for comparison, select the "Run" button to start the comparison process. Bulk message comparison is performed by taking each message in the Baseline tab and finding a matching message in the Candidate tab and looking for any differences between the 2 messages. Any differences that are found are recorded and saved for later navigation and reporting. A summary of the results is displayed in the main Bulk Compare window, a an example of which is shown below.
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Type - The type of message of HL7 message.
Baseline - the number of messages in the Baseline tab.
Candidate - the number of messages in the Candidate Tab.
Exact - the number of messages that are identical, or binary equal.
Exact % - the percentage of messages that are exactly the same.
Same - the number of messages that are semantically the same. Meaning they have the same content, but may have an extra empty field, or a field that was configured to be explicitly ignored.
Same % - the percentage of messages are semantically the same.
Diff - then number of messages that are different between the Baseline and Candidate tabs.
Not in Candidate - the number of messages in the Baseline tab that were not found in the Candidate tab.
Not in Baseline - the number of messages in the Candidate tab that were not part of the Candidate message set.
Field Diffs - the total number of fields that were different between the Baseline and Candidate message sets.
Errors - the number of parsing errors found during message comparison.
Navigating Message Differences
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The Field Differences view provides an HL7 Field centered centred view on the changes across the selected message type. In the image below all 10 fields that were different are displayed with the Baseline and Candidate field values shown on in the last 2 columns. A summary of changes based on each unique HL7 Path can be found in the "Field Difference Summary".
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