Updating Virtual Names in NISE Driver Session

Question

I have created a Driver Session in MAX for my VXI Chassis Slot 3 cards. In this Driver Session on the "Virtual Names" tab, I am entering some virtual names that will correspond to the names on our Interface panel -- i.e. the panel of pins that the outside world sees. In other words, the default virtual name M0CH1COM may become SW1_CH1_COM -- or whatever. I plan to go and create a Virtual Device after this, and when I load the IVI switches for this driver session into the Virtual Device, I will see my virtual names in the IVI Channel column instead of the default physical names.
Suppose I have a great number of these virtual names to enter for a particular driver session, and at this point I only want to enter half of the virtual names into the Driver Session. Once I am convinced that our system is stable, then I will enter the rest of the virtual names into the Driver Session. Is there any way in NISE to get the "last half" of the virtual names from the Driver Session into the Virtual Device that I have created already? I can see where I would have built hardwires, routes, route groups, etc. in the existing Virtual Device, but I'm not sure I know of a way to get the updated Driver Session info into the existing virtual device?
A simpler case of this would be if someone just forgot to enter a virtual name or two into a driver session. They might get further down the road in development, and find that they overlooked a few virtual names. Is there any way for them to go back, enter in those new virtual names, and have the Virtual Device recognize these virtual names?
When I tried to do this -- I could not find a way to get the new virtual names to be recognized by the existing Virtual Device. The only way I found to make it work was to create a new virtual device -- and doing this will cause me to lose my "custom" info in the virtual device.
Any ideas?
Harv

Answer 1

Harv,
I guess this question is related to your previous post.
When you enter virtual channel names in the driver session, the IVI specific driver is supposed to pass these names to NISE. If this is the case, then NISE will show the virtual channels and not the physical channel names. The virtual channel names need to be created before importing a switch in a NISE virtual device.
If you forgot to name a few channels in the driver session and already created a NISE virtual device you will not be able to go back and give virtual channel names to the remaining channels.
Let's assume that your new driver has the exact same topology, connections, channel number etc than the old driver but some channel names are different. CH0 is now name Channel0 and CH1 is now Channel1.
What you could do is export you configuration into an xml file, open the xml file with a text editor (notepad), search for the CH0 and CH1 and replace them with Channel0 and Channel1 respectively. You also need to point to the new IVI specific driver. Now, Create a new NISE virtual device by importing the changed xml file. When you open this new NISE virtual device, it should see that the channels names (Channel0 and Channel1) correspond to the names in the new ivi specific driver and you should not have a problem using it. You would not have to redo your entire configuration.
This will work if ONLY the channel names have changed. If anything else have changed this would not work and you would have to create a new NISE virtual device.