FTView SE Questions

Hi guys,

2 quick questions I hope you can assist on in relation to FTView SE.

1. Is there anyway to determine the revision of FTView app from the .apa or do I have to attempt to restore it and try and open?

2. I suspect it's as old as V4.00. Is there anyway of importing a V7/8/9 display into a V4 application? I have a screen that just contains numeric displays (its a lot of them 200 approx) and I really don't want to have to recreate the display and tag 200 objects on site.

Thanks in advance.

1. Officially, no. Unofficially, yes. Forum user dmroeder has written a program that can tell you the version of apa, mer and ACD files. Search the forum for it
[edit: feeling helpful today. http://www.plctalk.net/qanda/showthread.php?t=90986]
2. Officially, no. Unofficially, maybe but it will be painful. Basically, it's a case of:
a. export to XML
b. try to import, note the error code
c. edit the XML with notepad to remove the error
d. repeat steps b and c until it works or you go mad
The problem that you have is all the new features that the older version doesn't know how to work with. So, version 9 might have 200 numeric displays, each of which have a "gradient" parameter. Version 4 doesn't have that paremeter, so when it sees a numeric display object in the XML with the property "gradient=00000", it errors out. Read the error message, find it in the XML, and then do a find-and-replace to get rid of all 200 instances of "gradient=00000". Then repeat.
I've managed to make it work a grand total of once, and that was going from v8 to v7. Going from v7/8/9 to v4? That's going to be a killer. I'd put your chances of success at around 2-3%, unless you're way more persistent than me or have a intern whose time is worthless that you can exploit

Thanks ASF.

I'm on site now so I was able to launch FTView on each station to determine each revision. I just wanted to prepare in advance which didn't happen.

I was able to delete everything off the screen except the numeric displays and export to XML. An import worked fine. That was the heavy work. Seems the basic numeric display hasn't changed any properties over the years.

Thanks for your help.

Great, glad you got it to work!

For those playing along in the future, another option if you have 200 of something that you need to import, might be to create a display in the old version with one of the objects and export it to XML. Then you can compare the old XML to the new XML, and with some judicious find and replace make your 200 new objects have all the same properties as the one old object.

Got to say though, I'm 100% not surprised to learn that the FTView numeric input hasn't changed in years. It's a huge PITA and desperately needs updating.