Capital Change Explorer

During the design process, suppliers and OEMs need to understand, analyze and quickly visualize the impact of a constant stream of change requests. Capital Change Explorer addresses this requirement by comparing evolving design versions in a stand-alone, configurable package whose comparison results are immediately available for all stakeholders. This allows users to immediately assess design intent against its actual implementation.

Note

Capital Change Explorer requires a valid license in order to enable its functionality and also to view a package in a browser. Contact Siemens Customer Support to obtain this license.

Capital Change Explorer is a communication environment that enables designers to illustrate a snapshot of their changes in diagrammatic context, for independent stakeholders outside the design environment. It can be used by system, wiring, harness, and formboard designers to communicate changes to various stakeholders so that they can visualize changes, understand their impact, and provide feedback accordingly; resulting in selection and documentation of approved changes.

These packages are highly configurable and can be tailored to suit differing audience needs, for example Procurement Managers, Manufacturing Engineers or Design Reviewers by selecting the inclusion or exclusion of different reports and artifacts, as well as configuring the comparison engine. Results can be immediately shared by email links providing instant feedback and report content indicating the differences between an old and new design in a web page.

Figure 27: Example Engineering Change Request Process

Figure 27 shows an example Engineering Change Request (ECR) flow. Stakeholders including Harness Manufacturers and Component Suppliers review the ECR’s and determine which proposed changes are feasible and cost effective and should be incorporated in the design process. As each ECR is received a Capital Change Explorer package can be generated providing instant comparisons between versions.

Generating Capital Change Explorer Packages

For information on generating Capital Change Explorer packages follow the flow detailed in Generating Documentation

Various reports are available for inclusion in the comparison, including reports produced outside of Capital E/E Publisher. For further information see External Reports.

Configuring Capital Change Explorer

This topic provides an overview of Capital Change Explorer, and some options for configuring the package.

Various aspects of the Capital Change Explorer package can be configured, such as the types of components to be compared, report content and structure, system timeouts, diagram highlighting colors and the content of navigation sections and pop-overs. The configuration files are accessible under the Publisher folder in the Capital installation directory.

Application and Data Configuration Settings

Various Capital Change Explorer configuration settings are applicable to application files, while others are applicable only to data files.

The configuration files can be amended by editing the /publisher/changeExplorer/config.xml file. The application specific configuration settings enable you to control features such as auto-zooming, text delimiters, spreadsheet file format and numbers of rows per table page. If amended the application files must be regenerated for your new settings to take effect.

The data specific settings allow you to specify the different colors used for additions, deletions and modifications within the Capital Change Explorer package. They also allow you to set a highlight width factor. Changes to these settings take effect immediately on the creation of a new data packet.

Figure 28 shows an example configuration file containing both application specific and data specific settings.

Figure 28: Example Configuration File Settings

Configuring the Comparison Engine

You can configure the comparison engine by specifying the attributes, properties, and calculated system values to consider for differences. This is done for each supported object type in the comparisons.xml file contained in the Publisher/changeExplorer folder. Various attributes and system calculated values can also be included in the comparison, as dictated by your organization’s needs, this is achieved again by editing the appropriate entry. Figure 29 shows an example configuration file displaying the various attributes and values that can be specified for an electrical component. This example has been configured to compare wires, while ignoring harness calculations such as cavity components, lengths and weights.

This video provides an edited configuration file example.

Figure 29: Example Comparison Configuration File

Configuring Comparison Report Content

Comparison reports content can be configured through the relevant objectType.xml file contained in the Publisher/changeExplorer/Reports folder. The following settings can be specified:

• Report name: <report name="Bundles"

• Summary section inclusion: summary-included="true">

• Name of the report in navigation panel: <tables name="Bundles"

• The inclusion and order of the modified, added, removed, unmodified sections: "modified added removed unmodified"

• Default sorting column (ascending): sorted-by="{Name}">

See Figure 30 for an example file.

Figure 30: Example Report Content File

Configuring a Summary Report

Capital Change Explorer enables you to configure a single summary report giving an overview of everything that has changed on a design before accessing the more in-depth information detailed in the specific object reports. Summary report content can be configured by editing the summary.xml file contained in the Capital_Home/Publisher/changeExplorer/Reports folder. This file allows you to control whether to show additions, deletions and modifications, as well as set the report title and specify which objects are aggregated into the report. You can also set the attributes that are displayed in the report’s columns. The example below has been configured to include bundles, wires, multicores and so on, as well as the attributes Name, Part Number and Type Code.

When you access the report from your browser, you are presented with an overview of your specified objects that have been added, deleted, changed or left unmodified. Clicking on an entry in the report pans and zooms to the selected object on the diagram, if you have set your system to do this in the Capital Change Explorer’s config.xml file. In the screen capture below the changed object is highlighted in the report columns, and the diagram splits between the new and old version to highlight the differences.

Configuring Diagram Highlighting Colors

You can set different colors to highlight additions, deletions or modification changes on the diagrams. You can also set the highlighting width factor, whether to highlight modified table cells and also to enable the system to auto-zoom to a selected change on the diagram, when clicked in the report. Edit the config.xml file contained in the Publisher/changeExplorer folder to amend these settings. Figure 31 shows the file where settings can be specified. Figure 32 illustrates changes between two diagrams, with deletions and additions shown in different colors. Additionally in this example the highlighting width factor has been increased to draw attention to changes. Figure 33 shows an example of highlighted modified table cells, again to facilitate easy discovery of changes. Finally Figure 34 shows how a connector would rendered on your diagram, based on these settings depending on whether it had been added, deleted or modified.

Note

The colors you choose to highlight diagram changes must conform to standard HTML colors supported by all browsers. A full list of these is available at

Figure 31: Example Diagram Configuration File

Figure 32: Example Diagram Highlighting

Figure 33: Example Modified Table Cell Highlighting

Figure 34: Example Diagram Change Highlights

Configuring Change Designations

Tip

You can configure the designation Capital Change Explorer applies to modifications by editing the Language Dictionary. For further information see Editing the Language Dictionary CSV File in the Capital Design Tools - Common Functions User Guide.

For example “old” and “new” could be assigned V1 and V2 as shown below

This would then be displayed in Capital Change Explorer as:

If you update the Language Dictionary you must restart Capital E/E Publisher for the change to take effect. Please be aware that any Language Dictionary change will apply throughout the toolset.

Configuring Numerical Comparison Precision

You can specify the number of decimal places by adding the attribute numerical-precision to fields that need to be treated as numeric values. The precision can be defined as 0.1, 0.01 and so on, to indicate the number of decimal places that need to be displayed or compared as in the following examples:

comparisons.xml

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<value type="attribute" key="Weight" numerical-precision="0.01"/>

report.xml

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<column type="attribute" key="WireCSA" name="{CSA}" numerical-precision="0.001"/>

License Consumption and Timeouts

Viewing a package in a web browser consumes a license. To avoid situations where sessions may not have been closed correctly, thus holding on to a license that may be required for another user you can configure runtime timeouts. Edit the config.xml file contained in the Publisher/capital-explorer-runtime\app folder to amend the relevant settings. The sets the maximum time limit (in seconds) allowed for communications between the server and browser, while the sets the limit on user interaction with the browser. In both cases if no response is received within the specified limit then that session is automatically closed, and the license is released. Figure 35 shows a scenario where the is set to 25 seconds, while the is set for 600 seconds.

Figure 35: Example Timeout Configuration File

Closing a Capital Change Explorer Session

Caution

It is recommended that once the hosting server is no longer needed, it should be shut down by running the stopserver.exe contained in the generated package folder.

Parent Topic:

Packagers

Capital E/E Publisher User Guide, 2512.2606

Unpublished work. © 2026 Siemens