LogMAN

You are right, I haven't thought it through. Source access is required to recompile, which makes any encryption/obfuscation/protection annoying to reverse engineer at best.

Here is a KB article with information about the design decision of password protection: https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019LvFSAU Not sure why strong encryption would be impossible. One way to do that is to store a private key on the developer(s) machine to encrypt and decrypt files. Of course loosing that key would be a disaster

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the way this works is when you move up one folder, that folder is "selected", so pressing OK will open the folder again. What makes it confusing is that the filename (and not the folder) is highlighted active (blue and not gray), so a user might think that pressing OK will confirm the filename, which is not the case. To my knowledge there is no way to change this behavior in Windows (the dialog is not actually part of LV). By the way, even if you deselect the folder, it will still enter the previous folder, which is certainly not intuitive to most users (including myself). The only way to make it work is to "change" the filename (even just replacing one character with the same letter will do the job). Here are the different scenarios I tested: 2021-06-04_21-15-40.mp4

The file still exists, only the link above is dead.

Why stop there? Magic Delay.vi

I'm no expert with CLFNs but I know this much: LabVIEW does not have a concept for unions but you can always pass an array of bytes or a numeric of appropriate size and convert later. Just make sure that the container is large enough to contain the largest member of the union (should be 64 bit from what I can tell). Conversion should be simple enough for numeric types but the pointer requires additional work. Here is some information for dereferencing pointers in LabVIEW (there is a section about dereferencing strings). https://forums.ni.com/t5/Developer-Center-Resources/Dereferencing-Pointers-from-C-C-DLLs-in-LabVIEW/ta-p/3522795

It creates a headless instance, so no dialogs. I haven't checked the unattended mode flag, but I'd assume it is set by default 🤷‍♂️

You could run the build in its own context, which (to my knowledge) does not save any changes unless option 0x2 is active (see Wiki for more details). Application class/Context.Create Local Host App Instance method - LabVIEW Wiki

Thanks, this is very helpful. One more reason to replace the built-in functions with your library.

I recently stumbled upon this issue while debugging an application that didn't handle JSON payload as expected. As it turns out, Unflatten From JSON breaks on NUL characters, even though Flatten To JSON properly encodes them as ("\u0000"). I have confirmed the behavior in LabVIEW 2017, 2019, and 2020 (all with latest service packs and patches), currently waiting for confirmation by NI. Workaround: Use JSONtext

Got the same issue in LV2020 SP1 The page exists, it is just incorrectly linked

Yes it is, both ways. I'm glad you like it There is a new release which adds support for composition of maps and sets. Here is an example of what you can do with it: This is actually a very smart way of doing it. My library takes the keys and values apart into individual arrays. A key-value-pair is certainly easier to work with...

It's probably not a good idea sharing DBC files publicly. That said, your database loads perfectly fine for me. Perhaps your XNET is outdated? I have no problems with XNET 19.6

Welcome to LAVA 🎉 Not sure where you read that, here is what the LabVIEW help says: I don't see the benefit. Your projects will take longer to load and if the compiled code breaks you can't even delete the cache, which means you have to forcibly recompile your VIs, which is the same as what you have right now.

What you describe is called a fork Forks are created by copying the main branch of development ("trunk") and all its history to a new repository. That way forks don't interfere with each other and your repositories don't get messy.

In my opinion NI should finally make up their mind to whether objects are inherently serializable or not. The current situation is dissatisfying. There are native functions that clearly break encapsulation: Flatten To XML Variant To Flattened String Flatten To String Then there is one function that doesn't, although many users expect it to (not to mention all the other types it doesn't support): Flatten To JSON Of course users will eventually utilize one to "fix" the other. Whether or not it is a good design choice is a different question.

If you are leaning towards Mercurial you should visit the Mercurial User Group: https://forums.ni.com/t5/Mercurial-User-Group/gh-p/5107

Git I don't hate it - the centralized nature of SVN simply didn't cut it for us. No. It was my decision. Pro - everything is available at all times, even without access to a central server. Con - It has too many features, which makes it hard to learn for novice users. Only when I merge the unmergeable, so anything related to LabVIEW 😞

Please keep in mind that it is only my mental image and not based on any facts from NI. Perhaps both. If we can understand the current behavior it is easier to explain to NI how to change it in a way that works better for us. Here is an example that illustrates the different behavior when using indicators vs. property nodes. The lower breakpoint gets triggered as soon as the loop exits, as one would expect. I have tried synchronous display for the indicator and it doesn't affect the outcome. Not sure what to make of it, other than what I have explained above 🤷‍♂️ I agree, this is what most users expect from it anyway. It would be interesting to hear the reasoning from NI, maybe there is a technical reason it was done this way.

Disclaimer: The following is based on my own observations and experience, so take it with a grain of salt! The user interface does not follow the dataflow model. It runs in its own thread and grabs new data as it becomes available. In fact, the UI update rate is much slower than the actual execution speed of the VI -->VI Execution Speed - LabVIEW 2018 Help - National Instruments (ni.com). The location of the indicator on the block diagram simply defines which data is used, not necessarily when the data is being displayed. In your example, the numeric indicator uses the data from the output terminal of the upper while loop, but it does not have to wait for the wire to pass the data. Instead it grabs the data when it is available. Because of that you can't rely on the front panel to tell dataflow. Execution Highlighting is also misleading because it isn't based on VI execution, but rather on a simulation of the VI executing (it's a approximation at best). LabVIEW simply displays the dot and postpones UI updates until the dot reaches the next node. Not to forget that it also forces sequential execution. It probably isn't even aware of the execution system, which is why it will display the dot on wires that (during normal execution) wouldn't have passed any data yet. Breakpoints, however, are connected to the execution system, which is why they behave "strangely". In dataflow, data only gets passed to the next node when the current node has finished. The same is true for diagrams! The other thing about breakpoints to keep in mind is that "execution pauses after data passes through the wire" --> Managing Breakpoints - LabVIEW 2018 Help - National Instruments (ni.com) In your example, data passes on the wire after the block diagram is finished. Here is another example that illustrates the behavior (breakpoint is hit when the block diagram and all its subdiagrams are finished): Now think about indicators and controls as terminals from one block diagram (node) to another. According to the dataflow model, the left diagram (Block Diagram A) only passes data to the right diagram (Block Diagram B) after it is complete. And since the breakpoint only triggers after data has passed, it needs to wait for the entire block diagram to finish. Whether or not the indicator is connected to any terminal makes no difference. This is also not limited to indicators, but any data that is passed from one diagram to another: Hope that makes sense 😅

A Static VI Reference is simply a constant Generic VI Reference. There is no way to distinguish one from another. It's like asking for the difference between a string constant and a string returned by a function. The Strictly Typed VI Reference @Darren mentioned is easily distinguishable from a Generic VI Reference (notice the orange ⭐ on the Static VI Reference). However, if you wire the type specifier to the Open VI Refnum function, the types are - again - indistinguishable. Perhaps you can use VI Scripting to locate Static VI References on the block diagram?

Sure thing, it's also good to know there is a thread like that - first time I've head of it 😮

The number to string functions all have a width parameter: Number To Decimal String Function - LabVIEW 2018 Help - National Instruments (ni.com) As long as you can guarantee that the number of digits does not exceed the specified width, it will always produce a string with fixed length (padded with spaces).

Thanks, I'll report this to NI

I discovered a potential memory corruption when using Variant To Flattened String and Flattened String To Variant functions on Sets. Here is the test code: In this example, the set is serialized and de-serialized without changing any data. The code runs in a loop to increase the chance of crashing LabVIEW. Here is the type descriptor. If you are familiar with type descriptors, you'll notice that something is off: Here is the translation: 0x0008 - Length of the type descriptor in bytes, including the length word (8 bytes) => OK 0x0073 - Data type (Set) => OK 0x0001 - Number of dimensions (a set is essentially an array with dimension size 1) => OK 0x0004 - Length of the type descriptor for the internal type in bytes, including the length word (4 bytes) => OK ???? - Type descriptor for the internal data type (should be 0x0008 for U64) => What is going on? It turns out that the last two bytes are truncated. The Flatten String To Variant function actually reports error 116, which makes sense because the type descriptor is incomplete, BUT it does not always return an error! In fact, half of the time, no error is reported and LabVIEW eventually crashes (most often after adding a label to the numeric type in the set constant). I believe that this corrupts memory, which eventually crashes LabVIEW. Here is a video that illustrates the behavior: 2021-02-06_13-43-58.mp4 Can somebody please confirm this issue? LV2019SP1f3 (32-bit) Potential Memory Corruption when (de-)serializing Sets.vi