Automatic refactoring when renaming data items

[EdGarabedian]

Provide an automatic refactoring update to any renamed data item.
Although renaming should not be done willy-nilly, it is a common task during development.  As your process grows it can become burdensome to manually have to find references and rename each occurrence of data item.  If a rename could be detected, prompt offered to confirm with list of potential updates, that would be very helpful. potentially useful and core capability for other renaming/adjustment tasks such as renaming components, page references, etc.

[PSSupport]

A useful, if potentially risky trick is to export the diagram as an XML, do a find&replace in a text editor then re-import. But I agree with your request, it would be nice not to have to do such work arounds.

[EdGarabedian]

Yes, def have used the xml trick, very helpful. Have used it for code comparisons as well. Thanks, Ed

[Walter.Koller]

​I actually dont understand why renaming is an issue (and it definitely is) as there is an internal ID available that would resolve those problems

[Billy.Kidney]

This problem exists for all artifacts in the platform; business objects, processes, data collections / items.

[robert.nicklin]

Hello all,

In discussing this idea internally we have come across some difficulties when thinking about an automatic refactoring function in certain edge cases, specifically when using global data items as described below:

1) A user has a process flow that references a global data item, "Data1"
2) All of the content from page 1 is copied on to a new page - this creates a second global data item on page 2, also called "Data1"
3) The data item on page 2 is renamed - as it's global we would look to automatically refactor all references to "Data1" across all pages, thus updating all stages on both page 1 and page 2.

It's my understanding here that step 3 above would break the references to the original data item on page 1 as well as the copied one on page 2 which wouldn't be the intended function.

To provide more flexibility and tackle this edge case (and others), we wonder whether a find & replace function built in to the product would be an acceptable alternative? The objective here would be to allow easier updates to references in the case of a data item name change. This way the user can find references to the "old" data item name either across all pages or across the current page and update a selection of these references at will rather than expecting the product to know what stages should/shouldn't be updated when multiple data items with the same name exist in the process/object.

There would be a couple of extra clicks involved here to achieve the intended result over automatic updates, but this would be much more robust and would allow users to select what to update (and not update) more specifically.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Rob

[PeterWalker]

It's only a suggestion but my view would be that the product should simply just check first for naming conflicts and then just bail if one exists, informing the user of the details.

This way, the benefits are enjoyed by the developer whilst eliminating the risk to process integrity with minimal annoyance to the user in the process.

I could easily have misunderstood but does this sound sensible?

[foehl]

If I could like a comment, I would like the comment above 🙂

It seems odd not to provide a function that would be frequently useful for a lot of people because of difficulty handling edge cases. In the example given by @robert.nicklin, it seems the core issue is actually the fact that you can create multiple global data items with the same name in the first place. Preventing you from doing that would be a good move in any case and would also solve the issue with a refactoring solution.

I'm sure there are other edge cases that are not so clear cut, but echoing Peter's comment, I would have thought throwing an exception on edge case conflicts would be the best approach.​

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Ed,

Thanks so much for submitting your idea! After some internal discussion about the comments below, we've decided to move your idea to the Under Consideration status while we route it through our internal review process. 

We will update you as your idea moves along the lifecycle.

Thank you!
Melanie 

[MelanieGiuliani]

Hi Ed,

Congrats! Following our review of your idea, we have decided to move your idea to the Planned stage. 

We will update you here once your idea has been delivered in the product. 

Thank you, 
Melanie 

[chris.strong]

Closed duplicate: Ideas Portal: 13 June 2023 - Renaming Data item Names automatically