Tool for resolving Content changes, especially unexpected Content differences

[allister-beamable]

Describe the impetus of the Feature Request

Sometimes, often with no obvious reason why, Content Manager in a Unity project with Beamable will show that certain pieces of content are changed. This appears as a blue square next to the content item, when I expect it to be a gray square indicating that the content is fully in sync. The extra-mysterious, extra-frustrating case of this is when, immediately after downloading content from the realm, there are still blue squares. In this case it is not clear how to resolve the difference.

Anecdotally, the causes for this have included:

• switching between realms with different but overlapping amounts of data (for example, AllisterTest-prod has a lot less content than AllisterTest-dev, but they both contain stuff like currency.gems, emails.password_update, and a few others; when I switch from one realm to the other and do "Reset", it correctly resets the local content to what is in the realm, but all the items that overlap are shown as changed)
• content items with Cron expressions getting unrolled inconsistently

Regardless of cause, it is frustrating to not know why Content Manager is showing these items as different, and often enough the actual bytes within the .asset file are identical (implying that the difference has to do with file modification timestamps or tags). Having good ways to inspect, in detail, the reasons why an item is marked as changed, would go a long way towards allowing Game Makers to resolve the situation.

Describe the solution you would like

Anytime there are differences or errors on any content item, there should be a convenient, obvious way for the Game Maker to inspect the differences or errors. This should take the form of a persistent UI (that is, NOT an ephemeral hover-text or tooltip) where the Game Maker can see exactly why any individual item is considered different or erroneous, as well as navigation tools to view the differences and errors in a holistic, big-picture fashion.

Ideally this diff tool should also provide convenient functionality for resolving simple differences:

• revert individual entry to what exists in the remote realm (with confirmation "are you sure?" dialog, preferably)
• coerce timestamp to match
• coerce tags to match
• delete entry outright, planning to reconcile by downloading (also with "are you sure?" confirmation)

Describe alternatives you have considered

There are no alternatives other than "avoid Content Manager altogether"; the difference detection of Content Manager is fundamentally broken, but until we have visibility into it, we cannot say exactly how or why it is broken.

Additional context

Sometimes when there are truly spurious differences reported, forcing a domain reload in Unity helps, but it is very finicky to get that to happen properly. This is likely more of a deficiency in Unity as a whole than anything we can do about in the SDK.

[cdhanna]

The CLI should have a diff tool built in,

beam content diff

Should output some semantic set of changes like,

1. field value changed
2. new field
3. missing field
4. ???

Then each engine integration can ingest that data to visualize the diff, and offer buttons to make actions to modify the scriptable object stuff.

[allister-beamable]

I just checked, and hitting "Revert Item" on an item that is mysteriously different does not resolve the difference.

(in the screenshot, the item is leaderboards.default, and I am pretty sure it is showing blue because of the prod-to-dev realm switching I mentioned in the beginning of the bug description)

[cdhanna]

on that right click menu, we should have a "show diff" option that opens a new EditorWindow bound to showing the diff between the local content id, and the realm's version