Appreciate for some colleagues, there are scenarios where the ideal is not achievable for all code, application config and infrastructure config, especially where parallel work by multiple organizations operate on the same integration.
These can be Operational aspects in addition to understood Development scenarios.
Differencing can smooth the transitions for example:
* A deployment or configuration has occurred and the person responsible is not aware of Mirrored or DR environment also requiring a coordinate parallel update. Scheduled tasks come to mind.
* Upgrade may be staggered to minimize user downtime window, and app / infrastructure config may have planned gaps that need to be followed up and closed.
* There may be more than one organization and team responsible for managing, supporting and deploying updates. Where communication and documentation have not been usefully shared, cross-system comparison is good fallback to detect and comprehensively resolve the gap.
* It can help halt incompatible parallel roll-outs.
* A partial configuration deployment can be caught and reported between environments.
* Differencing can be useful between pre-upgrade and post-grade environments when applying root cause analysis for new LIVE problems, to quickly eliminate recent changes from being suspected of a problem application behavior. To allow investigation to proceed and iterate and avoid solution / upgrade rollback.
Just don't feel bad about not achieving an ideal, if have been left responsible for herding cats. There are ways to help that deployment work also.
I note the original question mentioned web production components. In the case of CSP pages, I use Ompare facility to always detect for the generated class and not the static csp source file. This will alert to cases where new csp page was deployed but manual / automatic compilation did not occur, and the app is still running the old version of the code.
You can check for XML invalid characters by decoding the encoded payload. For example:
zw $SYSTEM.Encryption.Base64Decode("VXRpbHMJOyBVdGlsaXR5IE1ldGhvZHM7MjAyMy0wOS0xMSAxNjo1Nzo0MiBBTgoJcSAKY2hrQ3RybChmaXg9MCkKCWsgXmdnRwoJcyB0PSJeUkZHIgoJcyBjdHI9MAoJdyAiUkZHIiwhCglmICBzIHQ9")
"Utils"_$c(9)_"; Utility Methods;2023-09-11 16:57:42 AN"_$c(10,9)_"q "_$c(10)_"chkCtrl(fix=0)"_$c(10,9)_"k ^ggG"_$c(10,9)_"s t=""^RFG"""_$c(10,9)_"s ctr=0"_$c(10,9)_"w ""RFG"",!"_$c(10,9)_"f s t="
Look for a $C( ? ) where ? is in 0,1,2,3 .. 30,31.
Note: Tab $C(9) and New line ($C(10) and $C(13,10) are fine.
Sometimes cut-n-paste from an email / word document will use $C(22) as a quote character.
Could these be opt-in Canals (Water-Channels) ?
Ref: Historic community reactions to less-formal posts / articles, where the expectation for work formality was not satisfied.