Exporting and importing favorites

You can export your favorites to a file and import them on another machine, or hand the file to an administrator to prepare. The export is a single .vff file; importing it merges those favorites into the favorites you already have.

Note: Favorites require a Standard or Site license.

Note: A .vff file is favorites transfer. It is not the same as a Config.vfx file, which deploys a standard application configuration — see Deploying a standard configuration. The two are unrelated.

Exporting your favorites

• Open the Organize Favorites dialog with Report Viewer › Favorites › Organize.
• Click Export, choose a location, and save. The suggested file name is ViewerFX Favorites.vff.
• If the favorites you are exporting include saved credentials, ViewerFX asks you for a passphrase. The passphrase encrypts the credential fields in the file; keep it, because importing a file that contains encrypted credentials asks for that passphrase to use them. Favorites without saved credentials export with no passphrase prompt.

Importing and merging

• Open the Organize Favorites dialog and click Import, then choose a .vff file.
• If the file contains saved credentials, ViewerFX asks for the passphrase that protected them.
• Import only ever adds or replaces — it never removes a favorite you already have. The file’s favorites are merged into yours.
• When an incoming favorite collides with one you already have, ViewerFX asks how to resolve it: Overwrite or Skip that one favorite, Overwrite All or Skip All to apply your choice to every remaining collision, or Cancel to stop the import.

Stored copies of reports travel with the export, so a favorite that carries an embedded copy of its report is included in the file and restored on import.

Editing a .vff by hand

A .vff file is readable JSON, and the report file paths appear near the top. An administrator can open the file in a text editor to add favorites or repoint report paths — useful when preparing favorites for reports that live on a drive or share the administrator cannot reach from their own machine.

Authoring credentials by hand

An administrator preparing favorites for reports they cannot open themselves can write a connection’s password directly into the file, in place of the encrypted block, using a plain value:

"password": { "plain": "the-password" }

A password written this way sits in the file as clear text. ViewerFX encrypts it into its own credential store when the file is imported, but until then anyone who can read the file can read the password. Treat any .vff that contains a plaintext password as a secret: restrict who can access the file, and delete it once it has been imported.

See also

• Saving favorites
• Organizing favorites
• Working with folders
• Managing the Global Login
• Command line parameters