web-based INI files

[Intaris]

I often find myself switching between different machines and different versions of LabVIEW and one thing always bugs me.  Sometimes I have to work on a customer's machine with their (almost always) awful settings.  The settings for the development environment are always different to what I want no matter what I do.  It's a pain to have to keep all up to date.

While I know others have suggested moving the ini file to the user folder or allowing us to choose the ini file, I would like to go a step further and allow us to enter a web URL to access our ini files.  This way I can work effeciently on anyone's development computer with minimal effort and we can even share our settings if we want to.  We could have community INI files for others to use.

[David_L]

I can actually see how this could help for support purposes.  We can point a customer to a remote ini file for troubleshooting.  Don't know how much it would be used other than that, but I think it has some merit...

[JackDunaway]

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Intaris wrote:

Don't know how much it would be used other than that...

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...synchronizing multi-developer environments.

[Intaris]

Or in my case synchronising single-developer multi-machine systems.....

[TCPlomp]

Perhaps an 'Include' functionality like Mercurial uses

Ton

[muks]

I can use this definetly. Kudos!!!

[Intaris]

I haven't started using quick-drop yet but since the personal quick-drop settigns are in the INI file, HERE's another reason for this idea.....

[Dragis]

I feel this idea will get more traction if it is more easily noticeable and the title isn't very easy to search for. In general, the ini format is just the way in which LabVIEW chooses to store the configuration options you select from the IDE. If we separate the storage format from the idea, we could rename this idea something along the lines of "Allow Synchronization of Preferences with NI.com Account or Cloud". Better suggestions?

[Intaris]

Feel free to rename.

"iNI" file for the apple/NI combo.....

[RENN]

I would love to have atleast the FP and BD settings transferrable.

The Best : During a new LV installation, a prompt with which i can decide whether to keep the old settings in the new installation or not. This feature is available in almost all apps i see today. this way i can forget about things i have done manually months back :). it saves a lot of time.

The context help (for entries in Tools >> Options) also shows  information about the Key value pairs in labview ini file. could be great!

this is a great idea Intaris.

[altenbach]

Yes, this web based ini file should be LabVIEW version agnostic, but only contain environment settings. Other local settings, such as recently opened VI etc. should probably remain local, because they may not exist on all machines.

Maybe it could be linked to our NI profile?

(This would be similar to the chrome browser. It is really fantastic how I can log into the browser on a newly built machine or android phone and immediately get all my bookmarks, saved passwords, etc. and I can get instantly back to work!)