Texts.xlsx and version control

[Jeroen1]

After using TouchGFX for some time now the project team is growing and multiple people are working on the design (multiple branches) adding screens and texts.

Since texts.xlsx is used as source for the text information and this file is in binary format it is impossible to merge changes between branches, rebase etc...

So this leaves us to merge changes manually (open both files in Excel an comparing them by hand) which ofcourse is quite error prone and tedious.

Can anybody recommend a better alternative way to handle this?

[Martin KJELDSEN]

Hi @Jeroen​,

Yeah, this is a "challenge". On some of the major projects i've worked on defining strings for the text sheet was organized in a way that had one guy update the sheet based on UX design specifications. In a lot of cases, 90%+ of the texts could be input from the start of the project.

The scenario where two developers are just adding texts as they go can be a challenge. There's an ongoing effort here to do away with the text sheet, but it's not in the near, near, near future. Historically, we kept the excel format because you could write scripts to check the length of the texts for you and compare against the width of textareas in your application.

In any case, there are some gnu tools that can "merge" excel sheets. If you use git, you can configure your .gitattributes to use these tools.

I know someone who has created an abstraction layer for the excel sheet which uses a textual, mergeable format + a third party language/translation management tool and just produces the excel sheet which is no longer required to be under version control.

Let me know.

/Martin