Find and replace in designer

Ignition
,
1

I am working on a project that was recently upgraded from Ignition version 7.8.5 to 8.1.43 in stages, moving from 7.8.5 to 7.9.21, then to 8.1.22, and finally 8.1.43.

As part of the cleanup process, I want to remove some old screens and templates. To assist with this, I’ve been using the Find Tool in the Designer. During the process, I tried to search for a screen with the path/name "Graphics_Test" but couldn’t find it in the results. Since I was certain that this screen is navigated to from the "Footer" screen, I opened the Footer screen to investigate further.

After opening the Footer screen and using the Find tool again, the results showed that the screen name "Graphics_Test" was configured in the template parameters. (For context, I created a button template that passes the screen name through a parameter.)

However, when I close the Footer screen and search again using the "All Windows" option, the result does not show that the "Graphics_Test" instance is used on the Footer screen. Interestingly, when I reopen the Footer and search again, the Find tool locates the screen name under the template parameters.

Could there be an issue with the upgrade, or might there be something specific to the Footer screen causing this inconsistent behavior?

Any guidance on resolving this would be appreciated.

2

Sounds like a bug in search/replace.

3

I'm pretty sure this is a known issue that we've looked at fixing and discarded, unfortunately. I don't remember the exact reasoning, but it's something to do with the way dynamic properties (such as template parameters), particularly their values, don't really exist unless the window/template is open in memory. So if "all windows" truly did a deep search of all windows, it would suddenly attempt to open every single window and template in your project, which very quickly becomes impossible on real, production systems.

4

There's also a bug, particularly after upgrading from 7, where the odd corruption happens to some bindings on pages, and this produces an exception while running the find which silently halts the process. Look in your designer console for an error produced when you try to find something. If you do, it won't tell you which resource produced the error, so youll have to use a binary algorithm to narrow down the culprit utilising the "find in selected" available in the context menu when selecting Windows or folders of Windows

5

Thank you, @pturmel @PGriffith and @nminchin.

As per @nminchin I will check designer console for the errors and post those.