Persist comments in XML

[RADSr]

I've been doing a lot of XML editing to quickly copy things like conditional formatting in dashboards.    I find it helpful to use XML comments to mark my place and note beginning and ends of logical areas of work.

All is well, the re-zipped files upload fine and the updated dashboards work as expected.

However, when I export again later, my comments are gone.  ( 4.9.7 - so this may be different in more recent versions? )

I'd like for them to not be.

** I've only tested this w/ exported dashboard XML, the benefit of persisting comments would apply to schema and business schema as well.

[awarrier]

Hi Randy, we understand the functional need and we will work to provide UI based alternatives in a future release to support this. The xml parser we use has strict built-in guardrails, so xml comments is not something we recommend. 

[Cameron]

Hi Randy -- curious about this. What other use cases have you found for editing the XML? Do you do this by hand, or using a program? 

[RADSr]

Cameron - renaming tables and schemas mostly and - related - copying a schema to do development work on it  ( e.g. I have a schema in a DEV environment and I want to test join strategies comparing test v. original  - I'll create an empty schema, export the schema I want to test, and then rename and modify the schema ID in the XML before importing )  

The other place I've found it helpful is where I have a column reference in many formula columns.   Even *navigating* formula columns in the GUI is kind of painful so it's much, much easier to edit formula columns with a search and replace in a text editor ( Notepad++ in my case ) than to go through the GUI.   

I also have tables with a ton of formula columns, and  there's no way to add a new one in a specific order or reorder existing formula columns.  

The formula columns are actually where I was adding comments into the XML ( e.g. on this date I changed this column reference for this reason ) and  found the columns had gone missing when I started the process for the next batch of changes.  

We ( PMsquare ) have talked about developing a quick GUI for the XML export files but haven't gotten there quite yet.