ShaunR

I would actually argue that maybe 1 type is enough and the problem is purely string manipulation. However, that excludes the binary (hence my suggestion). My JSON VIs, the JKI config file and the rather splendid library posted in the Setting Control Property By Name thread are all about "untyping" and "re-typing". I have found strings far superior to any other form for this since all labview datatypes can be represented in this way and, for human readable, have to be converted to them anyway, The introduction of the case statements support for strings has been a god-send. I'm not sure what you mean by " They don't have any ability to add their components piecemeal or to define themselves as a single string entity.". They are still just collections of characters that mean something to humans. And we are not talking about adding functionality to an existing in-built object are we? . N rank arrays are fairly straight forward to encode and decode if using strings as the base type (it's a parsing problem solved with recursion where the minimum element is a 1D array). Size and dim is really only required for binary, and the flatten already does that. The real difficulty is decoding to labviews strict typing since we cannot create a variant (which circumvents the requirement for typed terminals) at run-time. We are therefore forced to create a typed terminal for every type that we want to support and limit array dimensions to those conversions we have implemented. I think maybe you are looking at it from the wrong end. Timestamps and paths are really, really easy to serialise and so is the data inside an objects cluster (we can already do all of this). In fact. Paths and timestamps are objects, but, apart from their properties and data-not a lot of good to properly serialise since we cannot create them at run-time (I've been dreaming of this for decades )..

AQ. I presume your reluctance to support many of the types in LabVIEW is down to reconciling the speed and compactness of binary with the easy (albeit slower and bloated) representation of portable text based. Perhaps a different way of looking at this is to separate the binary from the text based serialization. After all. Aren't classes just XML files? All scalars and objects can be represented in XML, JSON and even ini files since the standards are well defined. The string intermediary is a very good representation since all types can all be represented in string form. An API with only these features would be invaluable to everyone including us muggles (jki config file VIs on steroids). We could then add more formats as the product matures.. The flatten already accepts objects but just doesn't quite serialize enough. That could be addressed to provide the binary. This is actually one feature that would budge me from LV 2009

Not a fan. Just a really easy way to link labview to browsers. I think another thread would be very short i.e. Prefer anything over xml .

Yup indeedy. There are some optimisations you can do to reduce the cases. All controls have a "label" and "Caption" of type text (single case), U8,U16,I8 I16 et al can have one case etc. But as soon as you get to graphs and the more complex controls, you pretty much end up with a case for each property/type That implementation is a lot cleaner than mine though but, in my defense, mine does produce JSON strings (for obvious reasons)

Don't you just love strict typing I've got a control scraper and it's counterpart which sets the values. Unfortunately it's part of the websocket API, so can't give it to you. Basically you have to use variants to get the control type and use the controls ref with the appropriate value property type to set it (case structure with a frame for almost every type). This means that it runs in the UI thread which is a real downer. You can encode the type in your string if you want it to be generic for transmission or you can use coercion to force values to the target controls type (different type of genicity). I would also suggest JSON rather than a comma delimited string Alternatively, you can wait for the serialization VIs in the other thread.

Clusters?

No idea about the LV bit.I just clicked on the *dmg and installed it since this is the only reason for me to use the Mac (I'm not even sure I know how to uninstall it ). PM me an email address and I'll send the API anyway so that if you do get something working; your ready to go.

All testing is valuable. I can compile the speed test which will also exercise the AES encryption as well as give a benchmark on your MAC (I'm running in a VM). Let me know which run-time engine you have (2009, 2010 or 2011) and an email address and I'll send it to you (I don't know how big it will be, but knowing LV a few MB-if thats a consideration for your mailbox limits). ......a bit later.... Scrub that. I don't have the app builder for Mac . Thanks for the offer though.

Hi Peeps. I've finally managed to compile SQLite binaries for the Macintosh and have tested the SQLite API For LabVIEW on OSX Lion (10.7) but need some kind-hearted people to test on other OSX systems to establish a minimum version (in particular 10.4 to 10.6). If anyone is interested and can spare a few minutes to try it out; please PM me with an email address and I will send the pre-release

Can you elaborate? Does this mean that saving the name of the clone created (at launch) and then opening a reference to it later is "unstable"?

Labview 2011 ships with http vis. Alternatively there is an old openG set of VIs which work really well if the answer to your datasocket issue (which I never use) turns out to be impossible.

What issue? Getting clones?

The LabVIEW Task Manager may do what you need

Why do you need their paths? The open VI reference accepts the VI name (if it is in memory).

That is just the youtube limits. Search youtube for "The Trap" to see the rest (the original was one hour and that was 1 of 6 on youtube). In addition to the video being a part of a longer one . It, itself, was one of three, hour long, programs.The first one (of which you have seen a bit), examines the theories of John Nash and Laing as people being suspicious, self interested beings and the adoption of his theories and models by economists. The others discuss what our Chicago friends did with it, how we reacted to it and (IMO) much of the reason why the world is the way it is today. The three parts (if you are interested) are: F*ck You Buddy The Lonely Robot We will force you to be free.

Yeah.. Well....You can blame game theory for that!.

\resource\plugins\utilities\IfDef.llb\SetSymbols.vi/GetSymbols.vi and the conditional disable structure does pretty much everything.

<mounts soap-box> Indeed. They are all amoral (as an entity). There is no conscience. No guilt. No compassion. No moral obligation to "do the right thing" or indeed any sort of social contract toward community outside those imposed by law. Whilst the beings that constitute the corporate entity may have all these;in itself, it has only one objective - to increase it's market share towards a monopoly via the vehicle of profit. The Victorians knew this. That is why they made a definitive distinction between corporate and social. The banks were the guardians of corporate. The government, the guardian of the social. The govt kept the banks in line with laws, and the people kept the government in line with votes. What happens when corporate merges with government? Either the corporations MAKE the laws and your/our vote is worth as much as chocolate fire-guard, or we all start calling each other "comrade" and espouse the merits of the mother-land. <climbs back off the soap-box>

The technology to sort and segregate trash has been around a long time (even recycling tyers). But why spend shareholders investments on machines when you can get the peasants to do it for free

I'm not quite with you on this one.The storage would be a part of the calculator AE and there would be no "pesudo FGV". FGV stands for "Functional Global Variable and the functions would be +/- which is why I don't really discriminate between a "Get/Set FGV" and an AE. As long as the functions are atomic, then the +/- FGV would complete its operation (read the value, operate on it, then output) and the other operation could not read the stored value whilst this is happening (as it can with Globals). The race condition that FGVs address is that the value cannot be read in other parts of the code until the current function has completed. So in your example, the result of 2+2-1 (with two VIs in parallel) will always be 3 once both have been executed. With a global it could be 5. Your example, however, uses functions which are commutative. So when you lay down your Calc VIs and do an add and subtract in parallel. You cannot guarantee which of the VIs will be executed first by LabVIEW, but, after they both have executed, the answer will be correct. If the order is important (i.e. the operations are not commutative) then you have a different type of race condition that has nothing to do with access timing to the underlying stored value (which is what globals suffer from). However. unlike globals, FGVs have an error terminal, so if it sequence is important, they can be sequenced via the terminals (e.g add then subtract).

UDP was quite extensively covered recently here. You can also download transport.lvlib which handles variable length UDP datagrams.

The singleton pattern is a method to resolve a common problem associated with OOP when a single object is required to be instantiated and referenced rather than a new instance of an object (the default OOP instantiation-Grandma loves sucking eggs). Native LV does the opposite by default (a VI is a singleton - a single object referenced wherever it is placed - system wide). No design pattern is required as it is implicit to the language. If you don't want this behaviour, then it can be set to "re-entrant". This aspect, however is a side-show when talking about FGVs vs Globals. Where the differences between FGVs, globals really lie is in "State" not "Data". In non-data flow languages state has to be managed and an answer to the icky state management problem was OOP. In the dataflow paradigm, state is implicit in the language. However. Sometimes state managed by the [LabVIEW] language is not sufficient or appropriate. So, when it is advantageous to do so, we specifically design an object to store state (a FGV). The "get/set version of pseudo FGV" [sic] or "Action Engine" is the native labview method of replicating OOP style objects where you encapsulate the state of the data and manipulate it with methods. Global variables cannot maintain state (only data). Neither can they be "sequenced" to maintain state via dataflow. This is the advantage of FGV over globals. Singleton behaviour is just the language specific being taken advantage of.

Well. There was a Windows Kernel update just shy of 1 month ago, but no virus scanner update for 2 months. I noticed that windows defender AND the the separate virus scanners real-time scanning is enabled on all of them. So I've turned off "real-time" checking and Defender on the PCs temporarily to see if it goes away. There are various murmurs around the internet on this subject and the usual response is "just live with it" (not acceptable for me!).

Nicely explained by Rolf (including the caveats). The way I "protect" myself from getting pushed into the corner is to have a few choice buttons or a keyboard combination that brings up a password protected interface (can either be an "Admin" area or just completely hidden until a certain key combination is pressed). Once in, I usually give the options to return to the windows shell (requires reboot), start an explorer window (only way to look at files) and re-enable CTRL+ALT+DLT (last two don't require rebooting).. Just booting into LabVIEW as the shell will usually flummox most operators/users. Disabling CTRL+ALT+DEL means that you can't get to task manager, from which, you can use the run command.

My favourite trick is booting into the LV program as the shell and disabling CTRL+ALT+DEL .