Substring Commands in Primavera P6 Client

Very few people realize that there are substring commands available in the P6 Global Change function (available in the P6 Client only).

Recently in a LinkedIn P6 group, a member was asking for help in renaming an activity UDF assignment. He had a large number of activities that he needed to change the UDF prefix on because of a plant renumbering. He had an existing UDF called Equip_ID and he needed to remove whatever the first character is and replace it with a ‘2’.

P6 has three substring commands that can be invoked from within Global Change: Substring (Parameter, start character, end character), Leftstring (Parameter, character) and Rightstring (Parameter, character). P6 also has the ability to use a UDF as a temporary variable or holding place to store a value and I can use an Ampersand (&) to concatenate two strings together.

Let’s look at how we can use these three functions together to change the first character of every UDF:

1. I need to strip the first character of the existing UDF. To do this, I will use the Substring(Equip_ID, 2, 255). This will leave me with a 254 character UDF.
2. I can write the UDF value into another UDF to hold the value (I will use user_text1 but you can use any UDF of type Text)
3. I can then concatenate the newly shortened value with the new prefix – a ‘2’.

Here is what it looks like in P6:

The Global Change will execute the first line to shorten and store, and then concatenate a ‘2’ with the shortened string.

Now, if we want to get really fancy, we could do it all in one line:

As always, make sure you back up your project before running a Global Change for the first time and make sure that you actually check the log file before committing your changes.