Lost all Lua code

[oldgearguy]

yeah, well, after editing and saving on a regular basis, one time I tried to add another method and after compiling, saving, closing, I re-opened that panel only to find all the Lua code is gone.

I only see the built-in stuff. The panel itself seems ok and up to date, but all Lua is gone. I can open previous versions and see the (older) Lua and panel, but not the most current.

Why/where did all that get dropped form the panel file?
Build 5.6.34

[dnaldoog]

Oh no!

Did you set this button by any chance? Lua is disabled It'll nuke all your lua code when you reload!

If not, can you reproduce that behaviour?

[oldgearguy]

No, that wasn't checked. Here's what I've done/what I know.

I copied a version of my panel from the Mac to my Windows box (PCM80_v94.panel).
Opened it, tested it out, all good.
Opened the Lua editor, and selected 'Export methods to files'
Opened the modulator list, selected columns of interest and exported them as a CSV file.
CtrlrX created a PCM80_v94 directory, a lua directory below that and populated it with all the Lua files. So far, so good.

IT APPEARS that the 'export' option in the Lua editor is sticky. Every time I edited the _v94 panel and did a compile and save, my Lua changes are reflected in the files on disk. That's a nice bonus.

However, there appears to be some side effects. If I save edits as PCM80_v95, it seems to work but as soon as I try to open the new _95 panel, CtrlrX crashes on startup (I see a strncpy() and other things in the crash log). I cannot save a working version to anything other than PCM80_v94.
When CtrlrX crashes, it seems to leave the PCM80_v94/lua/lua files directory tree marked read-only.
I guess CtrlrX was in a funky state because I created a new method, did a compile and save all, but the newly created Lua file/method was not saved.
If you invoke a method that is either not created yet or misspelled, CtrlrX crashes.
During one of these crashes, the association between the panel and the Lua code was lost.

So now I have a directory full of good and mostly current Lua files, an updated panel I like with no Lua attached, and older versions that have both the Lua and panel stuff together.

I can go into the current panel and manually add 100+ new methods and copy the code into them one at a time and if I have to do that I will. I was hoping there might be an easier answer.
I tried copying all the stuff from the old panel Utility tab into the newer panel, but that was unsuccessful.

[dnaldoog]

I didn’t even know you could do that. It’s a feature I’ve never used or even felt I had to.

I’m going to look into that, but one thing you could try doing, is locating all the lua code within the XML tags and cutting and pasting into the new panel. That is probably bound to work. So just open the .panel in notepad++ (in Windows) or some editor in Mac and copy and paste into the 95 version and I think that should work. I’ve sometimes done that when I couldn’t open a panel that had become corrupted.

[oldgearguy]

I'll try that. I attempted to paste some of that Lua XML directly into the Utility tab of the panel, but it didn't stay there even after a save.

I did the export because the panel is a mix of new stuff I wrote and a bunch of old Lua that I probably wasn't going to keep. However, modulators reference the Lua code so deleting them wholesale isn't smart. By exporting the Lua and the Modulator list, I can pull all that into Source Insight and then track down every place a method is used. It also makes it easy to find things like everywhere I do panel:getModulatorByName(0 or whatever and trace through calls and such.

It also means I can use Notepad++ to do easy column manipulation, indenting, find/replace across parts of files and so on.

Plus I can use Beyond Compare to see diffs between versions when the files and tables get really large.

EDIT - the copy/paste got me back to a decent state. I need to do the last round of updates, but it's about 98% current now, which is a huge step above yesterday's mess.

Thanks for the suggestion.