Our customes need an easy way to convert their layouts after a release update where tables and fields of the datasource might have changed. Therefore it would be nice to have an API which gets old field and new field and as a result all references in the layout are changed respectively.
Just to make sure - using the object model (DOM), this can be done by the application itself quite easily. However, I understand this request is for some kind of automatic refactoring.
The problem to do this on our end is the (un)ability to correctly parse the old formulas. If the datasource has changed in the meantime, formulas will no longer evaluate correctly which makes refactoring them a pure (somewhat error prone) search and replace task.
However I fully reckon some kind of refactoring might be a good addition. There’s a somewhat related request that could use the same technique here: Idea Place - combit Reporting Forum