Feature Proposal: Add some formatting control to the $changes() search token.

Motivation

Summary has some output controls, added as simple arguments to the token:

• $summary(50, showvarnames, noheader, searchcontex )

Changes however has two options with no format control:

• $changes Summary of changes between latest rev and previous rev
• $changes(n) Summary of changes between latest rev and rev n

Search calls Meta::SummariseChanges(). Default is to generate a "diff" in plain text, suitable for emails. Meta also supports generating an html formatted diff, but search has no way to trigger it. Unfortunately neither of these options can be used in a TML table, as they both embed newlines.

There are a couple of other tasks out there in this area:

• Item13995: $changes doesn't work - only generates a simple summary
• Item9464: Request to support negative rev's $changes(-1) for changes since the prior rev.
• Item1390: Ancient request for better rendering control on changes

Description and Documentation

This request adds some additional controls:

$changes Returns the 'print' formatted diff since the prior revision. This is the way it's supposed to work if Item13995 was fixed.

• n - request diff against revision=n (unchanged)
• -n - calculate relative diff from current revision.
• summary - Generate a simple text summary, similar to the default $summary option
• html - Generate an HTML formatted diff.
• print - Generate a printable format diff suitable for email notifications. (the default)

Search summary has added the following options. They probably make sense here for consistency.

$summary(showvarnames)	Topic summary, with %SOMEMACRO{...}% macros shown as SOMEMACRO{...}
$summary(noheader)	Topic summary, with leading ---+ headers removed Note: The tokens can be combined, for example $summary(100, showvarnames, noheader)

Examples

Impact

Most of the changes will be in Meta::summariseChanges(). The formatting flags need to be passed through to Meta for processing.

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: GeorgeClark - 27 Feb 2016

Discussion

Changed the "plaintext" option to "summary". If it looks like a topic summary, might as well call it that.

-- GeorgeClark - 28 Feb 2016

Added the showvarnames and noheader options for the summary option, consistent with the search summary.

-- GeorgeClark - 16 Mar 2017

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