1 Topic by cobraguy

  • cobraguy
  • cobraguy
  • Peavey CobraNet Guru
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  • Registered: 2008-05-28
  • Posts: 79

Topic: Find Those Aliases

You may find yourself asked to maintain or modify a project that supports third party control, such as Crestron,  using control aliases and the RATC protocol. In such a case it could be useful to determine all of the controls that have had aliases assigned to them. Alas there is no easy way to do that from within nWare other than to open each control, look at its properties, and see if an alias has been assigned to it. That could be very tedious and time consuming.  But there is an easier way.

An NWare project file (.npa file) is actually a compressed archive made up of many component files.
One of those files contains a list of all assigned aliases.
To access this file, simply make a copy the project file and then rename it with a .zip file type. For instance, if you have a project named myproject.npa simply make a copy and then rename it to a ZIP file; i.e. myproject.zip.

You can then double click on the file to view its contents and you will see a file named  control_alias.xml

You can open this file with a standard text editor or an XML editor to view its contents. If any controls have been assigned aliases they will be listed  in the file.  The interesting part of the file will look something like below where we can see that twelve control aliases exist in this example.  The field named alias in quotes, EQ1_BW, in the first line below for instance, is an alias.
You can then use the find 'control by alias'  function in the NWare project  to find each control that has had an alias assigned to it.

<alias alias="EQ1_BW" ruid="//devices/41/controls/bandwidth" />
<alias alias="EQ1_FR" ruid="//devices/41/controls/frequency" />
<alias alias="EQ1_LV" ruid="//devices/41/controls/gain" />
<alias alias="EQ2_BW" ruid="//devices/42/controls/bandwidth" />
<alias alias="EQ2_FR" ruid="//devices/42/controls/frequency" />
<alias alias="EQ2_LV" ruid="//devices/42/controls/gain" />
<alias alias="EQ3_BW" ruid="//devices/43/controls/bandwidth" />
<alias alias="EQ3_FR" ruid="//devices/43/controls/frequency" />
<alias alias="EQ3_LV" ruid="//devices/43/controls/gain" />
<alias alias="EQ4_BW" ruid="//devices/44/controls/bandwidth" />
<alias alias="EQ4_FR" ruid="//devices/44/controls/frequency" />
<alias alias="EQ4_LV" ruid="//devices/44/controls/gain" />

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2 Reply by r.kemp

  • r.kemp
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  • From: Birmingham, UK
  • Registered: 2008-11-25
  • Posts: 17

Re: Find Those Aliases

Thanks for this - this is a really easy way to get hold of the aliases. I have a couple of system I look after that have sooo many. I'll much prefer doing this rather than Telnet'ing in and listing the controls that way.

"Sorry print screen, you're fired"

Thanks again

It already sounds better

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3 Reply by ivorr

  • ivorr
  • ivorr
  • DSP Geek
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  • From: West Des Moines, IA
  • Registered: 2007-08-17
  • Posts: 56

Re: Find Those Aliases

An easy way to assign a control alias in Nware is to use Inspector. Click on the control, scroll all the way down in Inspector and look for the field labeled "alias". Double-click on the associated field in the Value column, type the alias, and hit Enter or just click on some blank space in the schematic. Don't forget to hit the Save button! Inspector works well for finding the alias of any control too.

Expression Labeling can also be used to assign aliases to multiple controls at once. Search the helpfile for Expression Labeling, and its pretty obvious after that.

The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. -Socrates

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