How Do I Search and Replace Text in the Project’s Objects? (Magic xpa 3.x)

Sometimes it is useful to find text within your project, and perhaps change it. For instance, you might have a copy of a report or screen print, but have no idea which task was involved. Or, you may have a situation where it has been decided to change the name of a certain piece of data: using “Salesrep” instead of “Salesman” for instance, or if some hard-coded company name is changed.

Magic xpa has good facilities for both finding and replacing text, as we will see below.

Finding Text

1. Select Edit->Find and Replace->Find Text (Ctrl+Shift+F).

2. The Find Text dialog box will appear.

3. Type in the text you want to find. In our example, we chose “DVD”.

4. Check Match case if you want the search to be case-sensitive.

5. Check Match whole word if you want only whole words that match.

6. Check Regular Expression if you want to use masking characters. These are explained in the Magic xpa Help file.

7. If you click on the >> button at the bottom, you will be able to refine your search, selecting which objects you want to search.

8. Click OK.

When the search is done, you will have a list of all references to the text in the Navigation pane. You can click on the results to go to the object.

Now, once you have a list of where the text is, you can save or print the list (see How Do I Save or Print the Search Results?).

Hint: While you are working with the Find Result list, you can delete the items on the list if you want (F3, or Edit->Delete Line). This is useful when you are working on a long list; just delete the items as you fix them.

Replacing Text

1. Go to Edit->Find and Replace->Replace Text.

2. Enter the text to find, in the Find field. Here, we are looking for the text “Dvd”, and we want to match the case.

3. Enter the text to replace the found text with in the Replace field.

4. Set the other options as you would if you were just finding text as described in the previous example.

5. Click OK.

6. If the text is found, you will be positioned on the first occurrence of the found text, with a Confirm Replace box. Here you have the following options:

1. • Replace: Replace this instance of the text, then jump to the next instance.

   • Replace All: Replace all instances of the text, with no more prompting.

   • Skip: Leave this text as it is, and jump to the next instance.

   • Cancel: Stop the find and replace.
     
     

7. When the Replace is finished, you well see a list of all the items that were replaced, in the Navigator. You can click on these entries if you want, to check that you replaced the correct text.