Primavera P6 UDF Title Remap

As we get ready to launch our P6-QA tool we were doing our final QA of field names, usability etc. and I was just not loving Ravi’s Portuguese or programmer naming convention, (Sorry Ravi). But before I went crazy and just started to change the names and break everything, I used our P6-Loader to extract all the Primavera P6 UDFs (User Defined Fields) from our demo environment.

Believe me, we have a lot of them – probably thousands with all the P6 add-on tools and automations we have developed, and with all the different layers of P6 UDFs.

To sift through all of them would be doable with search CTRL-F, but what if I hated what I changed, or even worse, if Ravi was not impressed with me going ahead without checking with him?

So instead I used the P6-Loader to pull out all the P6 UDFs. Then I filtered on the titles that started with EAI which we use when we create a new UDF in our system. Then I filtered again and I found all UDFs of interest at the project level. I fixed those titles and added a length checker to make sure I didn’t exceed the 40 characters maximum.

Then I searched and replaced the titles to the other UDF layers for WBS, activities, resources, expenses and steps as appropriate. This was much faster than navigating between the tabs in P6 and getting all mixed up about what was fixed and not. Finally, I sent this to the team to review to make sure I had it right before uploading it back into P6.

Once our P6-QA design team was okay with the changes, Ravi did the honors of loading the master list into our production, sandbox, demo, and trial areas in less than 5 minutes. AMAZING!!

It was so much easier and faster than doing it in P6 and saved me the time of making the changes in all 4 environments let alone having to verify I did not make any mistakes. Thanks again P6-Loader, you rock!