Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (zythum @ Mar 27 2009, 11:33 AM) While File Mappings aren't that difficult, the Windows API to deal with that is a bit more complex then just accessing a single function. So this part while in theory possible to be dealt with directly from the diagram using the Call Library Node is actually better handled in an external C DLL, that deals with these problems directly and offers LabVIEW a clean and easy to access interface. The real killer however is the Windows message handling that is required. To implement that in LabVIEW only is not possible, since there is no way for you as LabVIEW programmer to intercept specific Windows messages. There is a Windows_Message_Queue example on the NI site that offers a C++ DLL to do that, but it is not exactly for what you need and you will have to modify it to work for your purposes. So I would simply create a complete new DLL and put everything in there. If I would have to do that I would estimate about 1 day of work for this to get a reliably working DLL and two or three LabVIEW VIs to access this. Now I do have a lot of experience with external C code integration in LabVIEW, so if you are gonna do that expect to have quite a bit longer for this and be willing to learn C to a level that goes well beyond beginners level. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (EHM @ Mar 26 2009, 10:37 PM) Not sure about your proxy but I did not add the Host: xxxxxxxxxxxx in the past to my proxy requests and that worked. The Host can be added according to the RFC for forward compatibility but I don't think it is required. The absolute URI however seems to be at least for older HTTP versions a requirement. I did however use HTTP/1.0 as version indication so maybe that is why. And last but not least: are you sure there is an index.html document on the server. It could be index.htm or something entirely different so as a start I would try just the server address http://www.example.com/ without any document path. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (jlokanis @ Mar 24 2009, 02:16 PM) Anything special about your setup? Project or project VIs on a network drive? LabVIEW starting up from a network drive? It seems that there must be something like this. Something similar though not to LabVIEW only I see on my machine if I do not have a connection to my VPN server. Presumably because I have a path somewhere in the registry that points to a location on a shared drive only available when logged in through VPN. But Widnows seems to check that path anyhow everytime I click on a file in Explorer . It's annoying but not annoying enough to really dig through the registry to find the offending entry. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Yair @ Mar 24 2009, 01:55 PM) I hadn't noticed at first but if you go to his blog he has linked to, you can find some info about things he did. Seems he likes to tinker with computers and some of what is written there certainly is on the border of legality. Might be using dads LabVIEW copy or whatever and taking his last few inquiries together he might be just looking for things to crack, probably more to boost about than anything else. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (NeilA @ Mar 23 2009, 02:19 PM) What your ActiveX node requires is not directly a GUID but an object reference to one. Most likely because it requires it as the binary form of a GUID and not as string. Why someone would make an ActiveX interface like that is beyond me but here it is. You could try with Variant to Data. Failing that you will have to find out what reference class that node expects (you could try to right click on it and create a FP control and inspect its ActiveX class name). If that works you will have to find out how to instantiate such an object on your system and then find the method that intializes it with the string form of your GUID. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (BOBILLIER @ Mar 23 2009, 05:13 PM) So what speaks against making your LabVIEW application work in the format that the current user is using? LabVIEW's string conversion function give you every power to do that. If you know you need to deal with decimal point (for instance instrument communication) then disable the "use system decimal point" input at the string nodes or prepend %.; to all format strings for Format into String and Scan from String. If however you write out data to disk or whatever, such as a spreadsheet file to be read by the other application then just leave it as is and LabVIEW will use whatever is the current user setting for the decimal point. Don't try to outsmart your end user. They seldom can appreciate that . Instead make your application work as best as possible in the environment your users work. It may seem like a lot of a hassle to do what I explained above and after the fact it can be indeed quite a bit of work. But once you stick to this rule it does in fact not cost you any more work as it will get second nature to consider at all string formatting places if you do need a specific format or instead want to go with whatever the user has currently selected. It always depends who will be the other device/application dealing with the data. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (LVBeginner @ Mar 19 2009, 10:56 AM) WinHTTP should by default use the proxy server settings that you have configured for your IE. The local port is assigned randomly by the OS and should be of no concern to anyone. If you experience problems with the firewall you will have to create an exception rule in it that opens outgoing connections to the target port of the proxy such as 8080. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (BOBILLIER @ Mar 23 2009, 01:14 PM) MSDN is your friend. But if you intend to write an application for other users that is going to overwrite their preferred system settings you are going to annoy most of your users big time. A program trying to mess with my system is going to be uninstalled in a matter of seconds never to be looked at again, no matter how nice it is. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Yair @ Mar 23 2009, 02:18 PM) It is indeed undocumented and has no editors that are available to people outside the LabVIEW R&D and I honestly doubt there are even many people in LabVIEW R&D that still would know how to use it :-) Basically it resembles the Mac PICT format with some modifications. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (KarstenDallmeyer @ Dec 5 2008, 06:34 AM) If you know you want to use the broadcast address you can also just simply plop a U32 constant and type in as large a value as you like with at least 11 digits. LabVIEW will truncate it to the max for an U32 which is 2^32 - 1 = 4294967295 = 0xFFFFFFFF which incidentally is the U32 value of the IP adress 255.255.255.255. So while the String to IP seems to have indeed technically a bug I never would have noticed since I do not go through the turnabout way of using String To IP to pass the broadcast UDP address to the UDP Write node. Rolf Kalbermatter

This is a version I did about 15 years ago in what was then LabVIEW 3.1. I programmed it to work with 8bit color images but it seems to work well for the 1 bit images you provided too. It is by far not what I would recommend to program nowadays although I think there are some interesting ideas in there. If you look at the Decode Bitmap function you may wonder why it is programmed like it is. The reason is manyfold. First there was no inplace operations back then. Second this had to run on 486DX 33 MHz CPUs back then without requiring minutes of runtime execution. I think you could squezze out a few more optimizations but in general it was what was necessary to make a RLE Decoder performant in LabVIEW back then. As said it is not really how I would program it today both in terms of using LabVIEW features as well as overal architecture but here it is. I only upgraded it to 6.0.2 from 3.1 so it can be also read with the newest LabVIEW version. Nothing else was really changed. Download File:post-349-1237721972.llb Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Yair @ Mar 16 2009, 01:52 PM) Yair is quite right. Most of the scripting properties are NOT accessible remotely for a good reason. Think about security! And about how they build VIs in Vision Builder and Co: Quite simple by executing LabVIEW VIs that run in a special runtime environment that is part of the tool that has the scripting feature not removed. Can you create a VI executable that could make use of that runtime environment? No, not really, both because of technical limits (no tool to create a LabVIEW executable that would call this special runtime instead of the standard lvrt.dll) as well as legal (that runtime only comes with those tools and is part of their license). Even if you would have installed and licensed that tool on the target machine it would be legally questionable if you have the right to execute your own code using that runtime engine enclosed in there. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (flarn2006 @ Mar 20 2009, 07:32 PM) The answer is quite simple. If you would have the source code of LabVIEW you could! You could then easily build a "cheat engine" as you call it from that source code where the password check is disabled. However the password protection itself of LabVIEW files is fairly sound. There is encryption of parts of the (undocumented) binary file structure to create a hash key. And recent versions create multiple such hash keys over various parts and that spans even the plain text readable new style XML LabVIEW files. In addition a VI knows about the password protection of the owning library and vice versa and the same with classes. While patching an older LabVIEW executable was probably an option for a good hacker I have serious doubts that this is still possible within a reasonable amount of time. And it is the worst way as every single patch release of LabVIEW is nullifing that. Hint to NI: that would be one more reason to actually release intermediate patch fixes! Makes almost every user happy and makes the life for those trying to go around the password protection a little more difficult. In the past few versions patch fix releases were never really announced properly but only in according discussion threads. I would find it useful to consider a somewhat more proactive patch fix release announcement. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (ASTDan @ Mar 18 2009, 03:08 PM) While you can get away not using the project for simple LabVIEW host applications it sure is a very handy tool to use when you start to do multi target applications (host, RT, and FPGA, and/or PDA targets in one project). I also agree that the auto populating feature is rather disturbing than useful. My projects never contain the low level functions but only the top level functions of each target, the dynamic VIs in a seperate folder and any GUIs in another folder. Possibly I add another folder for some specific VIs etc. I still organize my files on disk too but I find it useful to have another level of organization where I can maintain a somewhat different logic of how to organize my VIs than what it looks on disk. The feature that is called autopopulating folders by NI (just copy the disk hierarchy into a seperate tree view) is not useful at all in my view, and does cause all sorts of headaches for the NI developers too to avoid cross linking in the project. That all said I still have projects that were developed in earlier LabVIEW versions and are currently maintained in LabVIEW 7.1.1. So I couldn't even throw away the traditional way of organizing VIs even if I wanted to. QUOTE (jgcode @ Mar 19 2009, 10:56 PM) neBulus and Neville D Maybe this would have helped? Real-Time Target System Replication I haven't used the code personally but I know they exist as I was investigating for a similar thing for a project that went cold last year. Now there is one for FPGA too. FPGA Target System Replication While I haven't used the latter the first one is indeed working. I didn't use it for multi target deployment but built them into the host application to have a user friendly way of updating the RT target with a new software version if that should arise. It is a bit tricky to built it into a user application in a way that it can be used by people not familiar with LabVIEW or even programming at all. I made it basically a one button click operation in the maintenance screen of the application together with another button to discover any cFP target in the local network to fill in the IP address to use. Seems trivial enough to use. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (RickAlta @ Mar 19 2009, 07:59 PM) It sure is messy and with a lot of troubles. The alternative is to create a LabVIEW DLL from that VI and export it as a C function (watch out for the function prototype to be exactly like what the callback needs to be). However that has also its own problems. Unless the LabVIEW version calling (indirectly through .Net) this DLL function is exactly the same than the LabVIEw version used to create that DLL, the VI will execute in the LabVIEW runtime version that was used to create it and hence be a seperate process. This means there is no possibility to share LabVIEW data between your caller and the DLL directly since memory pointers, refnums and just about anything else have no meaning in the other. The same would apply if your .Net component would execute out of process since it would invoke the C callback pointer in its own process that would instantiate the according LabVIEW runtime. The real question is why do you have this C .Net wrapper? If you would go directly to the .Net component and it would use .Net events for this asynchonrous notification the problem would be solved if you use LabVIEW version 8.0 or higher. There you can let LabVIEW handle .Net events directly by assigining it a callback VI that will be executed on occurrence of the event. This whole .Net C wrapper makes everything unnecessarily complicated for you. Rolf Kalbermatter PS: If you can go with something more recent than LabVIEW 8.0 because of two reasons: 1) LabVIEW 8.0 had quite a bit of quirks in many areas. I have found LabVIEW 8.2.1 to be a lot more stable and reliable but 8.5(.1) or 8.6(.1) should work just as well. 2) .Net events were new in 8.0. So I would expect them to have one or two quirks that you might run into in that version that might have gotten fixed later.

QUOTE (mesmith @ Mar 18 2009, 08:50 AM) No it is not exactly as you seem to think. Lets take your example: The proxy address is usually in the form of "myproxy.mysite.net:8080" since it seldom uses the standard HTTP port of 80. So you parse that address into the DNS name (everything up to the colon) and the port number, using 80 if there is no port number. Now pass this information to TCP Open. Then you have a HTTP Request of the form "GET /index.html HTTP/1.1". Since the Proxy must know to what server to forward the HTTP request you have to modify this by prepending the server address to the absolute path of the resource. So the command to send to the proxy will be "GET http:/www.google.com/index.html HTTP/1.1". That's all. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (neBulus @ Mar 17 2009, 02:31 PM) I do not have any exact numbers but it is probably quite a fast fix indeed. In earlier days (LabVIEW 3 and so) patch fix releases where actually a lot more frequent with the f number sometimes approaching two digits. So there might have been some that were actually released as fix before anyone extern to NI might even have noticed them. However I do think they should make it somehow possible to release such fixes more frequently and allow an easy installation. A lot of LabVIEW is nowadays not in the actual binary executable anymore but in external VI files, although mostly password protected, so it is often a matter of replacing one or two VI files in a LabVIEW installation as was with this particular bug. That could be easily made more frequent since the test scope of such a modification is rather limited. For changes that get into larger components like the LabVIEW executable itself I do understand that the testing before releasing is a major pain and they probably never will go to release such fixes in lets say a monthly interval. If those VI based tool would not be password protected we might fix them ourselves and make them available but as it stands now we have to rely on NI to do that for us. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (mesmith @ Mar 5 2009, 02:05 PM) I use SVN in several applications for some of our customers to version control Lua test scripts that they write. If they do not have a fully blown Apache server available to run the SVN repository on, I just have them install the SVN service on a regularly backed up spare machine. Usually their IT dep does the maintenance of that. This allows as many test stations as they want to be synchronized with the central repository. Each test station does a SVN Update on startup and an operator can easily force a manual Update from the application menu at any time. The application also allows to visualize the status of the local repository (modified, stale, conflict, up to date) and all individual scripts and also allows maintenance including committing changes, but most people seem to prefer SVN Tortoise to do that :-). I first intended to write an intermediate DLL to access the SVN API directly from LabVIEW, assuming this to be a cleaner solution than the command line tool. But time constraints made me opt for a System Exec approach instead for a start and it is working so smoothly I guess I won't consider going back to get the DLL interface ready. The SVN DLL API while very powerful is also quite involved (and certainly in no way suited to be interfaced directly through the Call Library Node). So I have a hard time to justify the rather big time investment since the command line tool works so good. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (mesmith @ Mar 4 2009, 03:02 PM) That is because a proxy is only meant for HTTP (and possible other similar protocols like FTP sometimes). The LabVIEW TCP/IP nodes access directly the Winsock library and the thing that does for IP what a proxy does for HTTP is called a network router . So it is not a problem of the LabVIEW TCP functions but simply a question of proper setup of your network. Basically a proxy simply acts as a web server that does hand the HTTP requests through to the end server (that could again be another proxy and so on). The way to handle such a case in LabVIEW is by making a thin layer above the TCP/IP nodes. By the way the OpenG HTTP functions do some proxy server handling. But it seems they have not been packaged yet, however they are on the OpenG Toolkit CVS server repository on sourceforge. Basically you open a connection to the proxy instead and then you have to parse every HTTP request and prepend the actual end address of the desired server to every relative URL in there. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (stevea1973 @ Mar 13 2009, 03:53 AM) No! LabVIEW has no way of guessing the padding of data structures and consequently it does not try to do that at all. LabVIEW itself always uses fully packed data (with possibly one exception on the VxWorks PPC real time targets but I haven't verified that for sure since I don't have the hardware handy and haven't really run into an issue with that yet). Another explanation why it does work without those padding bytes might be a #pragma pack(1) statement in the relevant header file before declaration of the data structures (and an according #pragma pack() after that, I would hope). Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (ACS @ Mar 11 2009, 03:38 PM) When you say it returns an array pointer do you mean returning it as function return value? That would be a very ugly way for an API to return such a parameter!! And if those process identifiers are really strings that parameter is anyhow not for direct LabVIEW consumption, really! However I would assume that they contain instead 32Bit integers for all practical OSes nowadays (possibly excluding 64 Bit versions). At least under Windows and Unix, OS Process Identifiers (or PIDs) are simply 32Bit numbers that can be passed to other APIs to identify a specific process. But since it is an array you will first need to know how big it is anyhow, before you can do anything. Can you give us the function protoytpe so we can see how it looks and what direction we will have to look for? Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (JustinThomas @ Mar 9 2009, 09:55 PM) 1) You could use some Install Builder like Install Shield to bundle all 3rd party libraries into one installer to be run. 2) Or you could write a small LabVIEW app that executes the various extra installers and launch that. 3) The poor mans choice would be to create a patch file that calls the multiple installers and have that executed instead. The OP of this thread however explicitly did not want to run that extra installer at all. Just bundle it on the CD so it can be installed manually if the need arises. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Jorge Moreno @ Mar 9 2009, 05:20 PM) ActiveX components need both be installed and registered on the PC you want to run them. Your Automation Nodes most probably throw errors (in the error out cluster) that you might have forgotten to handle, so the LabVIEW application tries to tell you that it can not load, initialize, or execute the ActiveX component but your lack of error handling hides that from you. Since a VB component also needs the according VB runtime installed it would be best to create a component installer in VB for your component which will also take care about bundling the right runtime and possibly other support libraries and on installation register all the necessary components on the target system. Then run that installer along with the installer for the LabVIEW application. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (CzaroK @ Feb 24 2009, 11:10 AM) There are a few caveats with this for sure. First you can not add a System ODBC Data Source if you do not have administrator or at least power user rights. So I doubt this is what you want to do in a built executable. Also you can simply format the parameters that would otherwise be created with the ODBC Data Source Manager dialog into a string and pass that string to the Open Database function as connection string, instead of a name to an ODBC data source. To see what you would need to put in a string you can basically configure on your development machine such a datasource through the ODBC manager and then fgo into the registry and look at the keys in the section for your data source in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ODBC\ODBC.INI for user data sources and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ODBC\ODBC.INI for system data sources. You basically just put each value in there in a format <keyname>=<keyvalue> and separate each such expression with a semicolon and you should be fine. No need to create a Data Source and you can even format the actual path to your .mdb file no matter where you have it installed. Rolf Kalbermatter

QUOTE (Joshuatronics @ Mar 6 2009, 10:21 AM) A program not crashing is absolutely no indication that everything is alright. Calling functions that take a buffer to return some information where the buffer is not allocate large enough, can cause anything from no problem at all until you do something else, crashing on exit only, crashing at a point much later than where the actual corruption occurred to crashing at the moment the memory corruption happens, but it could also have more subtle problems such as overwriting actual data used elsewhere in your program so that some subVI suddenly seems to return wrong results. This could theoretically go as far as corrupting some non crashing information in a VI or other file in memory and then after you save the file to disk you have a corrupted file on disk, that might not even be loadable anymore. So unless you did something you can securely attribute to having caused the lack of crashes now, I would be very uneasy about the fact that the application is not crashing anymore. Rolf Kalbermatter