Create safeguards against changing the machine name if view/display is currently in use

Detecting whether a view is used somewhere else is really hard if not logically impossible.
Also your second suggestion is really hard because actually the other modules should react on that.

My suggestion would be here to warn the user, that renaming the machine_name can cause some problems. What do you think about that?

Give user advanced tools and they will destroy their sites :)

About the data storage: The main problem is that the schema of panels would have to be dynamic. You can't know at install time what kind of data a certain piece of information want to store. So to be able to do that you would need a lot of really complicated mess ... It's actually also possible to find that information out if you would use just exported objects, so you could use php to find that out, but as i wrote above, that's not trivial.

About the central problem, the data structure wouldn't probably help as well, because you would still not know where references to views are in ... anyway added a tag, let's see who will create a warning on that setting.

Have added a warning below the field description. Adding the patch for the same.

Cheers

+++ b/plugins/views_plugin_display.incundefined
@@ -1436,6 +1436,7 @@ class views_plugin_display extends views_plugin {
+		  '#suffix' => t('Warning: Changing the machine name is not recommended. This may result in loss of configurations for some modules.'),

What about append this to the description and use spaces instead of tabs :)

Acknowledged !

I thought it was better to add it separately instead of adding it under description :)

Anyways, my eclipse completely screwed up the spacing. Attaching new patch.

+++ b/plugins/views_plugin_display.incundefined
@@ -1435,7 +1435,7 @@ class views_plugin_display extends views_plugin {
+          '#description' => t('This is machine name of the display. Changing the machine name is not recommended, This may result in loss of configurations for some modules.'),

We are currently in the stable phase of a contrib module, so we shouldn't break translations. What about adding a new t() function?

+++ b/plugins/views_plugin_display.inc
@@ -1435,7 +1435,7 @@ class views_plugin_display extends views_plugin {
+          '#description' => t('This is machine name of the display.') . t(' Changing the machine name is not recommended, This may result in loss of configurations for some modules.'),

Something like this ? I have appended another t() to the existing one for #description.

+++ b/plugins/views_plugin_display.incundefined
@@ -1435,7 +1435,7 @@ class views_plugin_display extends views_plugin {
+          '#description' => t('This is machine name of the display.') . t(' Changing the machine name is not recommended, This may result in loss of configurations for some modules.'),

this should be probably written small.

Silly me :-?

After having spent a full day trying to override a view template file (views-view-unformatted.tpl.php) using the view's machine name, which had been changed, I stumbled on this issue. The theme information was suggesting the template be named with the new machine name but, unfortunately, this was not being picked up in the Drupal processing. The template file was being highlighted on the theme info display but it was NOT being used. Using one of the non-machine-name template names that were suggested worked right away of course. I really think that when a change is made to the machine name, the user should, at the very least, be warned of the possible ramifications.

Re-rolling the patch against latest 7.x-3.x.

The 3 year old patch in #12 to views_plugin_display.inc applied cleanly to the latest views 7.x-3.x-dev and if still relevant needs to be reviewed.