Change Project Prefix

[Orbital]

When creating a new project in 2012, there's an option to create a file name prefix. Is it possible to change this prefix later? It would be useful when creating a copy of the project.

I also have a second question which is related to this but I'll move it to a new thread if needed. We currently have some Labview code that was written elsewhere, and is used at my university by multiple people (all using the same computer). We'd like to create copies of this code and all of its subVIs so that each user can make changes without affecting the others. For some reason all of the subVIs and top level VI are contained in a library, and we access all of it through the LLB Manager. I haven't seen this before - I've always put subVIs in a folder and used a project to manage them rather than a library. What would be the best way to create multiple copies of code organised in this way without creating conflicts? Would it involve prefixes? There are probably hundreds of subVIs so renaming manually would take a long time. I've seen a suggestion to write some code to do the renaming but it would be nice if there's a built in way to add or change prefixes.

Thanks for any help.

[Chris_Jones_NIUK]

Hi Orbital,

Unfortunately, there is no way that I am aware of to change prefixes after creation.

However, for your information, if you include VIs in a library, this will change the 'qualified name' of the VI as it also includes the name of the library in the format 'LibName.lvlib:VIName.vi'. 

If you change the name of the library it will effectively change the name of your VIs also. This will also have the effect of eliminating conflics as the actual VI name will be the same, but the 'qualified name' will differ.

Another thing to look into which may help you in overcoming your original issue of multiple copies/people editing VIs would be some form of source code control.

See the white paper below for further information on this:

http://www.ni.com/white-paper/4114/en/

[JÞB · Accepted solution]

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@Orbital wrote:

When creating a new project in 2012, there's an option to create a file name prefix. Is it possible to change this prefix later? It would be useful when creating a copy of the project.

I also have a second question which is related to this but I'll move it to a new thread if needed. We currently have some Labview code that was written elsewhere, and is used at my university by multiple people (all using the same computer). We'd like to create copies of this code and all of its subVIs so that each user can make changes without affecting the others. For some reason all of the subVIs and top level VI are contained in a library, and we access all of it through the LLB Manager. I haven't seen this before - I've always put subVIs in a folder and used a project to manage them rather than a library. What would be the best way to create multiple copies of code organised in this way without creating conflicts? Would it involve prefixes? There are probably hundreds of subVIs so renaming manually would take a long time. I've seen a suggestion to write some code to do the renaming but it would be nice if there's a built in way to add or change prefixes.

Thanks for any help.

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The "Best" way to do this would be to create a "Base" Project that contains a good starting place to "Make Copies" of then ADD this project to Project Templates with the option to add a prefix and banner to the project members when you launch  "Create Project">> "From Template"

As far as "Changing the prefix later"  You can either do this manually from the project explorer or via scripting using a save as rename and save all after for each project member.   You just need the callers in memory when the callee's name changes to force the save of the callers.  (Or you have a lot of work to do to replace the old dependancies with the newly named vi's.)

Yup, that would do it!

[Orbital]

Chris,

I didn't know that the qualified name included the library name, thanks.

Jeff,

Creating a project template and adding a prefix seems to be working great for this, thank you!