Mutabor

Description

Most of us work with config files, and I believe, spent too much time on it. For me, most of the time was spent on this things:

1. Figuring out, what variable means what, and where is the final value. (for example, what does this string mean: GenericL2VideoSharedFullMMNDCG160Tail=$Base$GenericFiltersetVideoTail$ $Base$GenericL2VideoShared$ ? is this only l2 ranker? Or l2 and l1? What additional metawords we have here? To figure it out I usually come through all file, searching for first occurrence of my variable again and again)
2. Cloning the flights. According to my experience, there is common situation, when you need just copy flight and change ranker path only. It takes a lot of time too: finding all occurrences, copy-paste, change number of flight…. And there is a lot of space to make a mistake as well.
3. Delete flights. Same thing: sometimes you need to delete the whole flight, and it could take too much time.

How to use

To ease this problems Extension for Visual Studio 2017 was created. Let me show you the functional:

1. Figuring out, what variable means what, and where is the final value. a. Choose the variable, you want to see. It could be left part:

or right part as well:

b. Right click on highlighted variable and choose “Show variable final value”:

c. Then, new window should appear. Variable will be shown in two views. Raw, final string:

Or, another option, view variable in a tracing grid – all variables that are used in your highlighted will be shown, until final one will be displayed:

d. It is not only about variables, you can actually take a look on a final augmentation:

2. Cloning the flights. This one is less obvious to use. a. Highlight the flight you want to clone (only part, that represent flight itself):

Right-click it, and choose “Clone variable” menu option. b. Windows with option will appears:

First text field represents your selection, next one represent flight to add. You have an option to add new flight only from your starting string (e.g. we are on string 1477, so below this string line, all strings that contains substring “MMNDCG153” will be added below original one, and all “MMNDCG153” occurrences will be substituted to “MMNDCG154”) Or made it for the whole file at once (mechanic is the same). c. Finally, you will see the log with changes:

d. As all this logic is performed with visual studio text editor, you can cancel changes by pressing Ctrl + Z, string by string. 3. Delete flights. Same as cloning, but simpler. a. Highlight the flight you want to delete, right click it, and choose “Delete variable”

b. After deleting, the log window with deleted variables will appear.

c. Again, you can undo it step by step.

How to install

Click to install -> install it (will require to restart visual studio and related products) Make sure that it is enabled: tools -> Extensions and updates

All options should appears in your right-click menu.

Next Steps

My next steps will be improving cloning (actually, ask user before adding a new string, it will be useful for avoiding intersection between image and video) And teach tool to work with datacenter variables (now all dc-specific augmentations are omitted)

If you have any suggestions or want to report a bug, please, feel free to contact me.