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I spent a long time online with YouTube support and finally got to the bottom of it. The Channel is back, and all the links work!

Phew that is a pretty strong opinion! Although I personally am not a fan of the overall style of DQMH none of my problems are with the scripting/wizards or placeholder text. I think any framework that tries to do "a lot" will be complicated... your own personal framework (which you likely find trivial to use) is likely to be a bit weird to others. DQMH is extremely popular for a reason... To paraphrase the words of a wiser person than I, "please don't yuck someone elses yum"

Many years ago I made a demo for myself on how to drag and drop clones of a graph. I wanted to show a transparent picture of the new graph window as soon as the drag started, to give the user immediate feedback of what the drag does and the window to be placed exactly where it is wanted. I think I found inspiration for that on ni.com or here back then, but now I cannot find my old demo, nor the examples that inspired me back then. Now I have an application where I want to spawn trends of a tag if you drag the tag out of listbox and I had to remake the code...(see video below). At first I tried to use mouse events to position the window, but I was unable to get a smooth movement that way. I searched the web for similar solutions and found one that used the Input device API to read mouse positions to move a window without a title and that seemed to be much smoother. The first demo I made for myself is attached here (run the demo and drag from the list...). It lacks a way to cancel the drag though; Once you start the drag you have a clone no matter what. dragtrends.mp4 Has anyone else made a similar feature? Perhaps where cancelling is handled too, and/or with a more generic design / framework? Drag window out of listbox - Saved in LV2018.zip

Look at this new download on VIPM https://www.vipm.io/package/bjm_lib_request_power/

You want an ability to override the Equality or Comparison operators? I'm unsure, whether it really existed in OpenG packages, but now you have those neat malleable VIs, that let you do that: Search Unsorted 1D Array , Sort 1D Array , Search Sorted 1D Array. They have an additional input to specify your own equals or less function in a form of a custom comparison class or a VI refnum. There's an article to help: Creating a Custom Sorting Function in LabVIEW

This is exactly what was said in that ancient thread: Tree control in labview. So if you add 65536*N to the Item Symbols property of the Listbox and have the "Enable Indentation" option activated, you shift the symbol/glyph and the text N levels to the right. Could be useful for simple 'parent-child' relationships, if you don't want to use a Tree. And still it's used in Find Examples / NI Example Finder window:

I once went for an interview where they gave me a coding test and asked me to modify it. It was a very long time ago so I don't remember the exact modification they wanted (nothing to do with memory leaks) but I do remember the obtain queue and read queue inside a while loop with the release queue outside. I asked if they wanted me to also fix the memory leak as well as the modifications and they were a little puzzled until I explained what you have just said. I must have seen (and fixed) this while-loop bug-pattern a thousand times since then in various code bases. I also created this VI which I generally use instead of the primitives as it intialises on first call, can be called from anywhere, and prevents most foot-shooting by rolling them all into a single VI and ensuring all references but 1 are closed after use. Queue.vi

Those aren't typo's and errors. They are tests to see if we are paying attention.

In the past I have used the IMAQ drivers for getting the image, which on its own does not require any additional runtime license. It is one of those lesser known secrets that acquiring and saving the image is free, but any of the useful tools have a development, and deployment license associated with it. I've also had mild success with leveraging VLC. Here is the library I used in the past, and here is another one I haven't used but looks promising. With these you can have a live stream of a camera as long as VLC can talk to it, and then pretty easily save snapshots. EDIT: The NI software for getting images through IMAQ for free is called "NI Vision Common Resources". This LAVA thread is where I first learned about it.

Just to share how I got around this: By deleting 1 front panel item at a time I found that one single control was causing PaneRelief to crash; an XY graph. Setting it temporarily to not scale and replacing it with a standard XY graph (the one I had had some colours set to transparent etc) was enough to avoid having PaneRelief crash LabVIEW, but it would now just present a timeout error: I found a way arund this too though: the VI in question was member of a DQMH lvlib that probably added a lot of complexity for PaneRelief. With a copy saved as a non-member it worked: I could replace the graph, edit the splitters with PaneRelief without the timeout error (even setting the size to 0), then copy back the original graph replacing the temporary one, and finally move the copy back into the lvlib and swap it with the original. Voila! What a Relief... 😉 I probably have to repeat this whole ordeal if I ever need to readjust the splitters in that VI with PaneRelief though 😮

I confirm that this license is nearly identical to the standard EULA we use for our commercial products. Some wording is not applicable to a distributed palette of VIs like this. Our intention was to share a few reusable tools, used internally, with the community. Ideally, we should have released them under a standard open-source license such as MIT or a similar option. These VIs have been released “as-is,” without support or any guarantee that they will function for your specific use case. You may need to troubleshoot or fix any issues on your own. Feel free to use them in any context. I’ll look into whether it's possible to update the packages on the tool network to replace the current license with a more standard open-source one.

I put a temporary ban on inserting external links in posts (except from a safe list). We'll see what affect it has.

This is the modern 2020's equivalent of "works for me".

Your reporting of spam is helpful. And just like you are doing one report per user is enough since I ban the user and all their posts are deleted. If spam gets too frequent I notify Michael and he tweaks dials behind the scene to try to help. This might be by looking at and temporarily banning new accounts from IP blocks, countries, or banning key words in posts. He also will upgrade the forum's platform tools occasionally and it gets better at detecting and rejecting spam.

Apparently they moved it under Visible Items Edit: This also affects other types of structures.

Well, there are two aspects. The first is the technical one from hackers diving into the software and unhiding things that NI felt were not ready for prime time, to complicated for simple users, or possibly also to powerful. The main reason definitely always is however: if we release that, we have to spend a lot more effort to make it a finished feature (a feature for internal use where you can tell your users: "sorry that was not meant to be used in the way you just tried") is maybe 10 - 20% of development time than the finished feature for public use. There is also support required. That costs money in terms of substantial extra development, end user quality documentation (a simple notepad file doesn't cut it), maintenance and fixing things if something does not match the documented behaviour. And yes I'm aware they don't always fix bugs immediately (or ever) but the premise is, that releasing a feature causes a lot of additional costs and obligations, if you want to or not. The other aspect is, if someone who is an active partner and has active contacts with various people at NI, he is infinitely more likely to be able to influence decisions at NI than the greatest hacker doing his thing in his attic and never talking with anyone from NI. In that sense it is very likely that Jim having talked with a few people at NI has done a lot more to make NI release this feature eventually, than 20 hackers throwing every single "secret" about this feature on the street. In that sense the term "forcing NI's hands" is maybe a bit inaccurate. He didn't force them, but led them to see the light! Not out of pure selfless love, but to be able to officially use that feature for himself. The according Right-Click framework was a proof of concept to see how this feature can be used and mainly an example to other users how it can be used, and indeed once it worked it had fulfilled its purpose. That it was not maintained afterwards is not specifically JKI's fault. It is open source, so anyone could have picked up the baton, if they felt it was so valuable for them. The problem with many libraries is actually, if they are not open source and free, many complain about that, if it is open source and/or free, they still expect full support for it! In that sense I have seen a nice little remark recently:

Well, you are missing some important details in "The story of how this came about". So maybe indeed "it is worth a post of its own". It was LabVIEW 7.0 where they forgot to put a password on one of the VIs shipped with LabVIEW. And that VI had some node(s) on its block diagram including, I think, the BD reference property for the VI class. The community indeed got excited. But what did NI do? They tried to hide everything again in LabVIEW 7.1! I made a joke then that "our mother" NI must had had a PMS so she put the most interesting toys on a top shelf. So I made a"ladder" for us, kids, to get to them again and called it hviewlabs was me then, because that was a name of my company I used to sell my LabHSM Toolkit, an actor framework with actors controlled by hierarchical state machines (statecharts), long before the Statechart toolkit by NI, "THE Actor Framework", DQMH, and even before LVOOP. After PJM_Labview has published his private class generator http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=307&hl=# and class hierarchies http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=2161# and http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=314&hl=hierarchy# (neither topic is available anymore) it became clear how to get access to private classes, properties and methods. However, it wasn't convenient enough. My PMS Assistant made it really easy. It gave back the access to those features to a much wider community of LabVIEW enthusiasts As you can see from the PMS topic discussion, by that time brian175 already had made his DataAct Class Browser. And he got really excited about the possibility not only browse but also to actually create objects, property and method nodes with the properties and method NI didn't want the users to see. By April of the same 2006 he figured out object creation too and incorporated the capabilities of PMS Assistant into DataAct Class Browser. At that point, I guess, NI decided that "the cat is out of the bag" and there is no point to resist. Nevertheless even after VI Scripting was made released by NI some classes, and even some properties and methods of public classes remain hidden even in LabVIEW 2024. I wonder why DataAct Class Browser is no longer available (as of January 2025) as well as original findings by PJM_Labview even here, on LavaG. Did NI "politely asked" admins to remove all that and just forgot about my PMS Assistant?

Unfortunately, many of those are bots. I've disable user:pages long time ago, because of the spam. If there's anyone that deserves a lot of credit lately it's @LogMAN. He's doing amazing work cleaning up the pages and adding/editing content. There's a push recently from NI to support the Wiki and promote its use to the broader community and within NI internally as well. So, we should see more traffic and more activity than usual, which is great. This is one of the reasons for the recent stability updates. I encourage everyone here on LAVA to find whatever LabVIEW topic they are passionate about and start adding some pages or even fleshing out some existing content that needs improvement. One way to start would be to find some information that you always wish NI had easily available on their website but could never get easy access to. Then create that on the Wiki.

I haven't had much time to investigate this until this month, but I think I've found the cause. XNodes on the production computer were not designed optimally. In the AdaptToInputs ability I was unconditionally passing a GenerateCode reply, thinking that the AdaptToInputs is only called when interacting with the XNode (connecting/disconnecting wires). It turned out that LabVIEW also calls the AdaptToInputs ability once, when the VIs are loaded and any single change is made, no matter if it touches the XNode or not. As I had many such non-optimal XNodes in many places, it was causing code regeneration in all of them. Besides of that some of my VIs had very high code complexity (11 to 13), because of a bunch of nested structures. When the XNodes regeneration was occurring simultaneously with the VIs recompilation, it was taking that a minute or so. After I added extra conditions into my AdaptToInputs ability (issue a GenerateCode reply only, when the Term Types are changed), the edits in my VIs started to take 1.5 seconds. Still the hierarchy saves can be slow, when some 'heavy' VIs are changed, but it's a task for me to refactor those VIs, so their complexity could decrease to 10 or less. By the way, my example from the previous page was not suitable for demonstrating the situation, as its code complexity is low and the Match Regular Expression XNode does not issue a GenerateCode reply in the AdaptToInputs.

I have always used this library to prevent the screensaver and windows lock from occurring. Our IT locks down the computer so the screensaver, lock screen, cannot be changed. This library bascially tells Windows it's in Presentation mode, e.g., slideshow, watching a movie, etc, such that the screen will not got to screensaver or lock screen.

Hello ladies and gentlemen! Prepare yourselves for a massive wall of text. Thank you in advance. First time poster, long time lurker. Over the last decade I have found answers to a myriad of Labview related questions I've had on these forums, and I'm hoping some of you can help me out with my current conundrum. I've a solo developer for a large labview based automation project. I have worked with other labview developers in the past, but we've always kept what we were working on very compartmentalized because nobody ever wanted to deal with LVMerge. At the time they all said Labview effectively had zero way to merge VIs. Since those old days (9 years ago) we've come a long way. Unfortunately like many engineers I am horrible about UI/UX design - I'm trying to fix basic functionality, I don't care that you can't find the button (at least I don't care right then). But because of how solid the software is getting we're finally in a good position to start dedicating time and effort into improving our UI flow and design. So in the run up to this, and knowing I had basically zero experience with LVMerge/Compare except that the previous developers considered it "impossible", I did a few tests. My goal was to continue some development in the block diagram of the main top level VI in my own git branch, while another developer worked on UX changes on a second git branch. Then when he was ready we'd merge everything back together. All of his changes were focused on the Front Panel - he never opened the block diagram once. He was moving things, resizing things, changing captions and boolean texts, but never labels, and then adding various decorations as he wanted for clarity and organization. My initial test merges worked flawlessly. I was surprised how easy my small merges worked. From there he tinkered away when he could over 4ish weeks on the UI and I kept my usual pace on the main top level working on various bugs. I tried to limit what I was doing in the top level - most of the block diagram changes I made were cosmetic. It needed some TLC. Anyway fast forward and now we're ready to merge everything back together and ... I can't. I cannot get it to work. I've tried so much stuff. At first the errors were almost always during the LVCompare phase, usually about an insane block diagram object on the "base" vi. I'm familiar with heap peak so after a crash I'd comb the error log as well as I could (wish that thing had some documentation) and then try to find the offending object and fix it. More often then not I wouldn't see an issue with the object at all, and lots of the advice online is "just delete and remake the object" but I hate that solution because it means I fundamentally don't understand the actual problem, and when I'm merging three different versions of a big VI that gets tough to do. I've been experimenting with the tools, and eventually turned off auto resolve. Okay cool that would get me through the compare stage and actually open LVMerge where I could select which versions of things I wanted. From here it became a game of cat and mouse where I go through changes one by one till I get a crash, investigate, fix, change something related to said crash, and then run it again. This has been time (and sanity) consuming. It never worked, and eventually I got stuck on a merge change that I couldn't even identify what it was changing between the three, but I know that no matter which I select it crashes. I've kept trying various things since then. Resizing the tab control positions to be exactly the same Deleting a few FP objects on the base and FP update versions that I had removed when making BP changes on my version Adding a few objects I created for the same reason Added all 3 versions of the VI to the main most up to date project, opening and running them all to make sure there are no serious insane objects that are breaking them. They all run. This is by no means an exhaustive list of everything I've tried, but its what comes to mind right now as the major tries. Currently the state I'm in is that when I run it with all 3 versions with all the changes from above made to them, I can't get through the Compare stage because it crashes with a insane object error about "undo.cpp" which makes zero sense to me. What is it undoing? I tried limiting the number of Undos in LV settings, that didnt help, I tried increasing the limit greatly, that also didn't work (maybe didn't increase enough? Trying that now). I'm really deep in the weeds on this one now, and I would love some fresh perspectives. What's probably going to happen is that I'm going to write it all off as a lesson, and we'll just have the UI dev make his changes again on my current most up to date version - but I would really love to figure out the compare and merge process, and best practices for using it. The documentation for these is abysmal. There's basically nothing. I could probably pay for NI's annual subscription and maybe get some direct help from them but I had it out pretty big with some NI sales guys a few years ago when they transitioned away from perpetual licenses to the subscription model, and I don't want to pay them on principle; but I will if needed. Ultimately even if we do the changes again, I'd still like some best practices on where we went wrong and how to avoid this in the future. We're growing fast, and I could see having another full time labview developer working with me in the future and would love to come away from this with as many answers as possible on how to work in a team on labview binary files. If you've made it this far all I can say is thank you. Now please send help. PS: some info I should of added we use Labview 2021. I don't think we're on SP1, I don't remember why not, and I am willing to try updating. also willing to pay the sub and just upgrade to 2025, but not without good reason like someone tells me all about how they solved so many issues with Compare/Merge in the last 4 years and its going to be so much better I'm attaching my most recent error log from the crash I had last night. Its a doozy, reporting a TON of objects on both the FP and BP as insane. lvlog2025-08-11-15-32-09.txt

I only switched to Win10 3 years ago from Win 7 and that was only because I wanted encrypted SMB to my NAS. I'll think about desktop Linux when they fix their application distribution methods . I dropped my Linux LabVIEW product support for a reason->my products broke every time someone else updated their product.

I would suggest rabbitmq, i want(ed) to present it at a LabVIEW user group (LUGE) but haven't done it yet. It's very powerful. I use redis and did a quick presentation (in french) at LUGE recently, i haven't used the stream feature though, I only used it as cache.

Hi My advice for managing multiple versions of LabVIEW is always the same : >>> Install only one LabVIEW version per partition if you also need to install any driver, toolkit or module. Or need other software that integrates with LabVIEW in some way. No exceptions. I do have VMWare installed with Windows XP to be able to open ancient LabVIEW versions like 6.1 or read the old CHM help files, accepting the sluggish performance of the VM environment. I avoid using it for anything 'serious'. To manage the span between LabVIEW 2018 and 2024 I would divide the disk into two partitions and install two copies of Windows and then install LabVIEW. To manage multiple partitions and selecting which to boot from by default, I recommend installing EasyBCD. But you don't have to. Windows creates a simple multiboot menu itself. There are other options too. But they require some dedication going into the art of multiboot management. ¤ You can install Windows on an external USB3 connected disk, SSD or FlashDisk. Microsoft abandoned the concept in 2020. But a program called Rufus revived the concept and now there are many tools that gives this as an opportunity. Works splendidly even with Windows 11. ¤ Some laptops ( and desktops of course ) support easy change of the disk. Sometimes using a replaceable disk craddle instead of the DVD drive. Good luck

Sir, TestStand is developed with C#, and my Sequence Toolkit was developed via LabVIEW from zero, and I posted it on this forum for the purpose of learning and communication. As a LabVIEW enthusiast who had ever worked at NI for several years, I don't understand why you said that.

Yup. There is: MMAP (1.0.1).

Some people might be tempted to use Obtain Queue and Obtain Notifier with a name and assume that since the queue is named each Obtain function returns the same refnum. That is however not true. Each Obtain returns a unique refnum that references a memory structure of a few 10s of bytes that references the actual Queue or Notifier. So the underlaying Queue or Notifier is indeed only existing once per name, BUT each refnum still consumes some memory. And to make matters more tricky, there is only a limited amount of refnum IDs of any sort that can be created. This number lies somewhere between 2^20 and 2^24. Basically for EVERY Obtain you also have to call a Release. Otherwise you leak memory and unique refnum IDs.

I cannot look at your file, but I suggest save the data to TDMS or any binary format of your choice. Once the file is saved, then you can convert it to text.

Drat, and now my typos and errors are put in stone for eternity (well at least until LavaG is eventually shutdown when the last person on earth turns off the light) 😁

@Rolf Kalbermatter the admins removed that setting for you as everything you say should be written down and never deleted 🙂

If the child classes are statically linked in the code (via class constants, or whatever other mechanism you use), then this approach should always work, because the child classes will always be in memory.

In addition to the LV native method, there are options with .NET and command prompt: Get Recently Modified Files.

That's how I'd do it. Then combine that with the Foreign Key Sort from my Array package, putting the Time Stamps into the Keys, then paths into the Arrays, and it will sort the paths from oldest to newest. Reverse the array and index at 0, or use Delete From Array to get the last element, which would be the newest file.

Done some simple testing. On a directory containing 838 files it took 60 ms.

I have experienced the same thing when my VI was the member of a large class. I removed the VI from the class, set the splitter positions, and then added it back to the class. :shrug:

C:\Program Files\NI\LVAddons\nivisa\1\vi.lib\_probes\default\VisaProbes.llb\VisaProbeInstr.vi

I can create it without problems in LabVIEW 2018 and 2020! So it is either that Scripting is not enabled in that LabVIEW installation or a bug in backsaving some of the scripting nodes to earlier LabVIEW versions. And I'm pretty sure that the Diagram property (called Block Diagram in the menu) is available since at least 2009 or thereabout. I can check this evening. My computer at work only has LabVIEW versions back to 2018 installed.

@Natiq this (non-functional example) should be enough to get you started. The weird arrow thing on the boundaries of the while loop is a shift register. The event structure can also be configured to have a timeout case where you can then perform other stuff, like reading your image and writing it to the reference on the the shift register. There is heaps of information out there (YouTube for example), a bit of searching will lead to some more details.

IIRC there are a couple of RTSP libs for around (a while ago now). Some are based on using the VLC DLL's and I even saw one that was pure LabVIEW. Might be worth having a look at them for "inspiration".

To analyze large time series remotely I have a client application that splits the data transfer using two methods; It will break down the periods into subperiods that is then assembled into the full period by the receiver *and* if the subperiods are too large as well they are retrieved gradually (interlaced) by transferring decimated sets with a decimation offset. So, as a result of this I need to merge multiple overlapping fragments of time series (X and Y array sets). My base solution for this just concatinates two sets, sorts the result based on the time (X values) and finally removes duplicate samples (XY pairs) from it. This is simple to do with OpenG array VIs (sort 1D and remove duplicates VIs) or the improved VIM-versions from @hooovahh, but this is not optimal. My first optimized version runs through the two XY sets in a for-loop instead, a for loop that picks consecutive unique values from either of the two sets until there are no such entries left. This solution is typically 12-15 times faster than the base case (<10 ms to merge two sets into one set with 250 000 samples on my computer e.g.). Has anyone else made or seen a solution for this before? It is not as generic as the array operations covered by the OpenG array library e.g., but it still seems like something many people might need to do here and there...(I had VIs in my collection to stitch consecutive time series together with some overlap, but not any that handles interlacing as well). It would be interesting to see how optimized and/or generalized it could be solved. I have attached the two mentioned examples here , they are not thorougly tested yet, but just as a reference (VIMs included just in case...). Below is a picture of the front panel showing an example of the result they produce with two given XY sets (in this case overlapping samples do not share the same value, but this is done just to illustrate what Y value it has picked when boths sets have entries for the same X (time) value): Merging XY series LV2022.zip

Setting up the project:

i can't really answer your question but I suggest you watch this presentation :

I can confirm that LabVIEW 2018 SP1 f4 (32-bit) automatically selects LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 when "automatically select recommended installers" is checked and LabVIEW Runtime 2018 SP1 f5 is installed. Though, it does not ask for the installer source. There used to be SFX installers that were extracted to "C:\National Instruments Downloads". When such an installer was used, the destination folder must not be deleted as it is used as a source location when creating installers in LabVIEW. Perhaps you installed the runtime engine through an old SFX installer and deleted those files at some point?

MAT files are now just H5 files(HDF). Look at the library https://h5labview.sourceforge.io/ and find the example for writing a MAT file. You just need to add a special header in the beginning. I assume the dlls needed will work on Windows server, but am not sure.

Here is a VI that gets the title of the window that is active. You could then continually loop until the title you expect is active, then perform operations. https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Get-Current-Active-Window/m-p/3930389#M1116926

I am glad that didn't ve time to install NXG 😀

Looks like someone beat me to it! Oh well, I already exported it (also for 2009, incidentally) so I'll post it here in case it'd be more convenient to use a regular VI file. 0 to -4096.vi

These are two separate issues: drag over not working, and drop deleting tree items. You can use the attached VI to copy a tree and event structure out of. What's important is that you have the old event ("Drop?", not "Drop"). You can replace the tree with a system tree as long as you right click on the tree and select Replace. Don't delete the tree. TreeWithDropEvent.vi

It adds properties and methods to the LabVIEW VI server hierarchy, mostly application related and presumably project and other such stuff, that NI considers to dangerous, untested, or giving to deep insight into LabVIEW. It is related to scripting but not the same thing. Rolf Kalbermatter

Maybe you'll get Xmas before you know it... I found a way to retrieve all tags from a VI. I basically scan the VI file and get an index to the position of tags in the file. I then extract the tag names. Since I don't know to which objects it is related, I have to scan all objects on FP and BD to associate them properly. Once done, you get a list of refnums and variants for the Object's references and a list of tags to which it is associated. I also included an example of code to write a tag to the Block Diagram. Use the same template to write to FP or any objects. Open the project and launch "Get All Tags from VI". Browse the path to the example file "Tagged Test VI" and that's it. Saved in 8.6 but will work in 9.0 (2009) as well. Note that the versioning is important as tags are seen only through scripting and NI can change the way it is saved from one version to the other. Retrieve Tags 8.6.zip