One of my readers, Jiri Bus, needed a thesis project.  He decided to write an application that performed a detailed comparison between two reports and showed all the differences. He calls it rpt_diff and released it under the MIT open source license. I recently wrote up a simple method that relies on the features included in the “Report Definition” export.  Jiri’s project takes a deeper dive into the object model and includes many more features for comparison.
His application is free but it takes a few extra steps to deploy and use. Here is what you need to do to use rpt_diff:

1) Download and install the 32-bit Crystal Reports runtime for .net.
2) Download and install KDiff or another equivalent program for comparing text files.
3) Create a new folder for the rpt_diff application file and associated files.
4) Download the (already compiled) rpt_diff.exe and place it in the new folder (no need to install it).
5) Place the two reports you want to compare into that same new folder.
6) Right click on my sample batch file and download it in the same new folder:

sample batch file

(Note – if you just click on the file link the file will open in the browser rather than downloading.)

7) Edit the batch file so that it has the correct path to KDiff and the correct names of the two rpt files to compare.
8) Save the modified batch file, close the file and then run it by double-clicking on it.

You should see two XML files open in KDiff, with all their differences color coded.

Any time you want to compare another pair of files, just copy them to this folder and put their names into the batch file.

And thanks again to Jiri Bus for sharing his work.