Mass editing of CONTROL variables...or even scripts

Hey guys,
I am sitting here this morning tweaking the table length of probably 800 numeric tables in PAC control. You can imagine that this is time consuming…it will likely take several days and cause carpal tunnel. You have to click on each variable, click on the field, type new length, save and then wait for the update. Then you go to the next one on the list. This isn’t something that will have to be done often…we are doing this for a system expansion. However, there has to be a better way for mass editing. I often find myself in less extreme situations where I wish for such functionality…now I am screaming for it. I know that we can export/import charts. Is there any clever way to use this or other functionality to edit variables? Or maybe direct editing of the cdf files? It is moments like this that cause me to question my sanity…all help would be appreciated!

In the same vein of thought…I have always wanted the ability to have some sort of version control. In DISPLAY, this is a lost cause. However, in CONTROL I see an option that isn’t terrible. You can use the cxf generated by the export process. This would provide an opportunity for merging changes and showing differences. The same with the otg files for IO. So we have pretty much everything needed for mass editing and basic cvs in CONTROL…except variables! Mary/Ben…any genius or backend options? Maybe you know of a ninja script command to edit table length?

So I am looking through the cxf. It does appear to have variables listed. However, I don’t see the table length. There are a quite a few wacky/ascii characters. Anyone know how to interpret table length in the cxf? By the time someone responds…I may have the pattern figured out. A nice cxf filter/plugin for notepad++ or vim sure would be nice. I can’t be the first one to go down this path…

The .idb is in a similar format. How are these things encoded? It is all about encoding. Editing would be a snap! There is risk in doing this of course…I understand. Not seeing any patterns usable for editing table length using standard encoding…

Have you used AutoHotKey? That’s been helpful to some in this kind of situation.

On your version control question, check out [U][B]this post[/B][/U] where I shared some suggestions and work-around ideas.

Wish I had better answers for you!

I finally did get through the CONTROL and made my way into DISPLAY. I have even more there. Autohotkey looks like it could help a ton. We built a grid of graphics to represent different outputs. Each is layered with at least 10 different objects with multiple attributes. Quick math says I have about 4000 changes to make (after updating alarms and the recipe file). Just having hot keys for Z-Order alone will make a huge difference! I didn’t expect anything groundbreaking…but the autohotkey is a huge help. Thank you!

Here is a screenshot of the grid. Imagine each of those blocks covering multiples underneath along with various text. Each has different visibility attributes depending on the state of I/O.