Copy and Paste via the clipboard

It is not always desirable or sensible to have to create hundreds or even thousands of new definitions within the development environment. For this task, the table editor supports an Excel-compatible clipboard format.

A text group from the language switcher can be copied to the clipboard (select the project explorer, then press Ctrl + C) and pasted into Microsoft Excel (open Excel and press Ctrl + V in the first field).

Two tables are inserted here (text groups <Language.Groups> and texts <Language.Texts>), whose structure is very similar to the parameters of the corresponding definitions. The first line below the table identifier in angle brackets shows the parameter names. This is followed by the definition values. The additional [Parent] field establishes the reference to the parent definition.

The reverse method, i.e. copying from Excel and pasting into »EASY UI Designer«, works in the same way, but under the following conditions:

The project explorer operates in context, i.e. Definitions are inserted where you previously placed the selection.
Definitions that already exist (synchronisation takes place via the name) cannot be added. At most, parameter values are overwritten after a confirmation prompt.

So if you select the existing text group before pasting, a group with the same name is created underneath and the corresponding texts are created in it. If, on the other hand, you select the superordinate node User texts, the system determines that the definitions named in the clipboard already exist in the project and asks what to do. You can then choose whether you want to overwrite the definition parameters in the project with the values from the clipboard.

If, for example, you select the Variables node with the clipboard content specified here and paste it there, nothing happens because the content of the clipboard is pre-filtered using the table identifiers placed in angle brackets.

If you stick to the predefined table template in Excel, you can customise your own lists accordingly and copy them to the project via the clipboard.

The assignment between the parameter name in »EASY UI Designer«and the identifier in the table header of the clipboard format cannot always be read directly. In some cases, several parameters from the development environment are even combined in a table field in Excel.
In these cases, it has proven useful to first create various definition patterns with the desired parameter combinations in »EASY UI Designer«, copy them to Excel and adapt or multiply them there as required.

Some definition types reference each other. For example, a variable definition always contains a reference to a group and optionally also to unit classes and structures. If you insert such definitions into a project via the clipboard, the referenced objects must either have already been inserted beforehand or also be part of the clipboard content when inserting the referencing definitions.
When inserting multiple tables, however, it does not matter whether the referenced or the referencing definition is named first in the clipboard. This is regulated by the development environment. For example, if your clipboard content contains variable and group definitions, you do not need to pay attention to whether the group definitions are at the top of the list. The system first searches for the group definitions named in the clipboard and then the variables.