Stable serialization of data source XML

Hi everyone,

I'm heavily using XML-based data sources so be able to maintain those files in Subversion. That makes them easily accessible to other employees and one can track all changes like IP-addresses for hosts, changed login scripts for web-UI because of printer firmware updates and stuff like that. I simply love it! :-)

What I don't like, though, is that for pretty minor changes like an IP only of some session, RDM seems to always rewrite entire connection nodes in the underlying XML. It removes old ones and appends new ones, which makes unnecessary difficult to follow DIFFs in SVN. As all of the individual connection nodes have some GUID-ID already, which doesn't change during updates, it would be far better if changes for existing connections could be applied in-place. So that a change to some IP of some connection really only results in one changed line containing the IP itself.





Depending on how you serialize XML, the easiest approach might be to apply some stable sorting to connections and their items whenever the XML is created. Connections always bei their IDs alphabetically, items of connections always by their alphabetical item name. Currently it seems updated nodes are really removed and appended and in-place updates might be difficult to achieve. Simply rewriting the entire XML with stable sort order might be the easier implementation.

Thanks!