To help developers work with dynamic channels—such as when names change or channels are disabled—plug-ins maintain an array of valid channels. Wiring a property node to a plug-in class wire provides direct access to the ValidProducerChannels, and ValidConsumerChannels arrays:

Knowing what channels are valid allows developers to configure their plug-ins correctly and produce the right data for the available channels.

When channels assigned to a plug-in need to be changed, developers can use Replace Producer Channels VI and Replace Channel Group VI to replace multiple channels at once rather than individually. Replace Producer Channels VI replaces all existing producer channels with a specified list of channels, which can be useful in situation where the user configuration changes in a way that requires a completely new set of producer channels. Replace Channel Group VI replaces all channels in a particular group with a specified list of channels, which can be useful in situations where only a subset of the channels need to be replaced.