STVi Generation Question

[jorton]

Good morning,

I believe I have successfully generated an STVi to go with a theme I am working on.

After generating the STVi I noticed that I missed a couple little things that I would like to adjust. This STVi only contains small visual adjustments to the layout of the screens and assigns some images to panels that didn't have them before, so no serious code.

Before you ask... I no longer have the original modified Sagetv7.xml that I compared to the base Sagetv7.xml (I did a reintstall and didn't back up like a dummy...)

This is my recovery plan,

1. Start again with the base SageTV7.xml file and import the STVi.

2. Make a few minor changes to the "base SageTV.xml + STVi".

3. Compare the "base SageTV7.xml + STVi + Changes" to my saved base Sagetv.xml to generate a new "completed STVi"

Does this sound OK or will this cause me problems?

Thanks for any guidance,

Jeremy

[GKusnick]

Yes, that should work. It will be apparent when you do the compare whether you've done it right or not.

[tmiranda]

Jeremy,

That should work. As a matter of practice when working on an STVi you should IMMEDIATELY "Save As.." the SageTV7.xml file to something else like SageTV7 With My Changes.xml. You should also IMMEDIATELY change the UID prefix BEFORE making any changes. This will save you a lot of headaches down the road. Believe me, I've made those mistakes before.

Tom

[GKusnick]

I'd recommend that you get in the habit of using "Save Copy As..." rather than "Save As...". The difference is that "Save Copy As..." just saves a copy of the file, whereas "Save As..." saves the file, sets the saved file as the current STV for that client, reloads it into Studio, and re-imports any enabled STVIs. This is usually much more than you want to happen during a Studio editing session.

Also it should not be necessary to change the UID prefix every time you start a new STVI (if that's what you're suggesting). In fact it's not strictly necessary to change it at all, since it will default to a unique value on new installations. What you definitely do not want to do is change it to be the same prefix on more than one machine, or wipe out your Sage installation, do a clean reinstall, and then set the UID prefix back to one you used before (either by setting it explicitly or by restoring an old properties file). Each installation of Sage (including clean reinstallations) must have a unqiue UID prefix, and the default is set up to accomplish this if you don't mess with it. (In-place upgrades of an existing installation can keep the same prefix since the sequence numbering is not reset in that case.)

[tmiranda]

Ouch!

I'd still recommend changing the UID prefix. I got bit by not doing this when I used one STVi as the basis for another. I ended up with two different STVi's that shared a UID prefix and this made them incompatible with each other.

[GKusnick]

We've had this discussion before, at the time of your UID mishap, and the conclusion then was that changing the UID prefix would not have saved you. If the cloned widgets do not get assigned new UIDs, then it doesn't matter what the prefix is now; they keep their old prefixes and you risk collisions. If they do get assigned new UIDs (which is how the Import command works now), then the sequence numbering takes care of any collisions by assigning new suffixes, so there's no requirement that you change the prefix first.

That's not to say you should never change the prefix. Doing so is harmless so long as the new prefix is unique across all Studio installations, and is probably a good idea if you suspect a sequence numbering issue as a result of copying or restoring old properties files. But changing it every time you start a new project is overkill and doesn't buy you any additional protection from collisions caused by cloned widgets.

[Fuzzy]

I've never touched the UID prefix.. don't even know what that means.. ;-) I do all my dev work on a single installation though, and most my stuff so far is pretty limited in scope.

[jorton]

Thanks for all the help and discussion guys. I definitely have to get into the habit of "saving a copy as" and backing up to another location so when I reinstall I don't lose everthing.

Hopefully it will all work out and I won't have to redo everything from scratch.

Cheers,

Jeremy