Extension Goal:

You may trace to multiple targets and want to save all the collected data for all targets at some point.

This script allows you to use the Auto-save settings (file name mask) to save all your collected data via a menu command.

Once installed, this script adds a "Save All Sample Sets (via Auto-Save)" menu option to your File menu. When you hit that, any targets that have an auto-save mask configured (and auto-save turned on, with any interval) will have their data saved using the file masks configured in auto-save.

Required PingPlotter Pro version

This extension requires PingPlotter Pro 3.00.3p beta 9 or higher. It will *not* work on the released 3.00.2p version.

Installation Instructions

• Download the attachment from this post (link near the title). The file will be named "Save All Targets Command.ppx".
• Save it in your "c:\Program Files\Pingplotter Pro\scripts" directory (or the appropriate path if you've not installed to that location).
• Close and restart PingPlotter Pro.

Once running, you'll see a new menu option under the File menu for "Save All Sample Sets (via Auto-Save)". Hitting this will go through all targets and use the Auto-save settings to save the sample set in memory. After the save is complete, you'll get a status box that shows all the files that were created.

Wrap up

If you find any issues are problems, please post a message here or send an email to support@pingplotter.com.

Hi Pete,
could you clarify what you mean by "any targets that have an auto-save mask configured" -- I thought Auto save was a global option that affected all monitors? I do not see how it can be configured to only auto-save for certain targets... am I missing something?

Also, why is Auto save a requirement here? I dont use it personally (dont want the clutter) but I would really like to have the feature to save all data sets at once. Is there any way a filename pattern could be entered "runtime style" instead of having to use the Auto save features?

better yet, would is somehow be possible to just make this feature native to PP3, because it is helpful to be able to view the "stacked" graphs and it would be nice to just be able to save a whole day's worth of collected data from multiple targets and then load this back so it is all in one window, like it was while PP was running.

I hope I am explaining this properly. Basically, its would be like the "save workspace" command but ALSO saving the DATA along with it...
is this possible? I am doing some troubleshooting at the moment with a client and they have several stores so I am trying to monitor them all together to figure out where problems might be originating, and saving all the data at once would be a huge help.

thanks

Hi, Luke.

Auto-save is set up on a per-"named configuration" basis. So if you have multiple named configurations, they can each have their own auto-save settings (you might have a set of targets you always want to save, and another set you don't really care about - disposable one-off targets, for example).

This extension uses the masking of auto-saves because there's already a user interface there for it. There are certainly other ways to do this. If you open the .ppx file, you can "tweak" this a bit yourself. The interesting stuff happens starting on line 55 - you can see how the auto-save status is checked and then the mask is set. The filename is calculated from the mask setting (that's really what we're using here - we need to know what mask to use, so we use the existing set).

If you want some different behavior, there are a few possibilities, we just need to figure out how it *should* work. If you always want it saved to the same directories, with the same mask, that logic could very easily be inserted into the script. If you want it to prompt you, using a default (maybe the default from the last time), again, that can be easily inserted. One of the great things about these extensions is that they can be evolved over time, based on requirements, and once things get nailed down enough, we can incorporate them into the application.

For the current implementation, if you set your auto-save interval to something like "30 days", then you won't have to worry about auto-save actually happening, but this script will still work.

We'll probably get a "save data with workspace" option in a future release, but there are some complexities with that which made us *not* include it yet.

- Pete

ok I understand. I will try using a very long auto-save interval. but definitely count this as my vote for adding the "save workspace + data" feature to a future pp3 (4?) version. <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

this is the message I got when I tried to enable Autosave so I could use this feature:

what am I doing wrong?

It looks like the highest save interval you can go is actually 24.5 days. Anything higher than this gives this error.