Rolf Kalbermatter

The most proper solution will be to go through all the files retrieved through the Read Linker Info function in the Generate Resource Copy Info.vi, find all shared libraries and from there their callers, enumerate for Call Library Nodes in the diagram and retrieve the library name and patch up the "delimited name" in the linker info for the shared library with the file name portion of that library name. In the Copy Resource Files and Relink VIs.vi, simply replace the file name portion of the path with the patched up "delimited name" value! The finding of the callers is already done in the Generate Resource Copy Info.vi, so we "just" have to go through the Resources Copy Info array and get the shared library entries and then check their Referrers. This assumes that all the library paths are properly wildcard formatted prior to starting the build process as it will maintain the original library name in the source VIs. Possible gotcha's still needed to find out and resolve: - Is the library name returned by the scripting functions at this point still the wildcard name or already patched with the resolved name while loading the VI? - Are all the scripting functions to enumerate the Call Library nodes and retrieve the library name also available in the runtime or only in the full development runtime? Although the Build Application.vi function is most likely executed over VI server in the target LabVIEW version and not as part of the VIPM executable runtime?

Yes, we kind of talk past each other here. Mostly because it is an involved low level topic. And VIPM is in this specific case technically pretty innocent. It uses the private Read Linker Info and Write Linker Info methods in LabVIEW to retrieve the hierarchy of VIs, relocating them on disk to a new hierarchy, which is quite a feat to do properly, patching up the linker info to correctly point to the new locations and writing it back. The problem is that the paths returned by Read Linker Info are nicely de-wildcarded, which is a good thing if you want to access the actual files on disk (the standard file functions know nothing about shared library wildcard names), but a bad thing when writing back the linker info. The Read Linker Info itself does not deliver the original wildcard name (it could theoretically do so in the "delimited name" string for shared libraries as that name is otherwise not very useful for shared libraries, but doesn't do so, which is in fact a missed opportunity as the fully resolved name is already returned correctly in the path). The only way to fix that consistently across multiple LabVIEW versions is to go through the array of linker infos after doing the Read Linker Info, recursively determine the callers that reference a specific shared library, enumerate their block diagram for any Call Library nodes, retrieve their library name and replace the "delimited name" in the linker info with the file name portion of that! Then before writing back the Linker Info, replace the file name in the path, respectively in newer LabVIEW versions you have the additional "original Name" string array when writing back the Linker Info, so might be possible to pass that name in there. Quite an involved modification to the existing OpenG Builder library.

This works on Linux too, and did so in the past for the OpenG ZIP library. I'm not really sure anymore what made me decide to go with the 32/64 bit naming but there were a number of requests for varying things such as being able to not have the VIs be recompiled after installation, as that slows down installation of entire package configurations. And the OpenG Builder was also indiscriminately replacing the carefully managed lvzlib.* library name with lvzlib.dll in the built libraries so that installation on Linux systems created broken VIs. In the course of trying to solve all these requirements, I somehow come up with the different bitness naming scheme with the LabVIEW wildcard support, but I think now that that was a mistake. In hindsight I think the "only" things that are really needed are: to leave the shared library name (except the file ending of course) for all platforms the same the simple modification in the VIPM Builder library to replace the shared library file name extension back to the wildcard add individual shared libraries for all supported platforms to the OGP/VIP package. But since VIPM has only really support for individual system platforms but not the bitness of individual files, we need to name the files in the archive differently for the bitness and let them install both on the target system with their respective name create a PostInstall hook that will rename the correct shared library for the actual bitness to the generic name and delete the other one Of course with a bit more specific bitness support in VIPM it would be possible to define the shared library to install based on both the correct platform and bitness, but that train has probably long departed. Will have to rethink this for the OpenG ZIP library a bit more, and most likely I will also add an extra directory with the shared libraries for the ARM and x64 cRIOs in the installation. Will require to manually install them to the cRIO target for the library to work there but the alternative is to: have the user add a shared network location containing the according opkg packages to the opkg package manager on the command line of the cRIO do an opgk install opgzip<version> on that command line That's definitely not more convenient at all!!!

Actually it's a little more than one edge case. It's potentially about any DLL that your library somehow references, including potentially built in LabVIEW functions that you use and that resort to calling DLL functions somewhere. Those might contain the 32 in their name or they might not, and they might also use the 32/64 naming scheme or not, and that would affect them too. Unlikely to happen? Probably, if you don't build a huge application framework library. Impossible? Definitely not. It's your tool and you decide how you use it. Just don't come and whine that it destroyed your perfect library. 😀 At least it always works to replace the file ending with a wildcard! Unless of course you decide to use a different file ending for your special purpose libraries for whatever reason! That would have to be also caught by checking that the actual file ending is indeed the expected platform ending and only then do the file ending change to a wildcard. It may sound like esoteric and far fetched edge cases, but I prefer to program defensive, even if I'm going to be the only final user of my functions. ☠️

It would seem so. You look for a way to hack VIPM to do something specific for your own shared libs and leave anything else to its own trouble. 🙂 I was trying to find a way that is a more general fix but that seems in fact impossible at this point, unless there is a way to actually have LabVIEW return the original library name for DLLs as filled in the Call Library Node. Hmmm, thinking of this there might be, but it would involve a lot of changes in VIPM. When Reading the Linker Info earlier in the Builder, it may be possible to go through all shared library entries, get their caller name (with the link index) and then do a Find Object on the diagram of them for the Call Library Nodes, get the actual library name as filled in the Call Library Node, which hopefully hasn't yet been messed with by the loading of the VI into memory, and later on use that name to reset the linking info.

Not likely as there are many potential problems. For one, properly configured Call Library Nodes for system libraries will report a relative path with just the library name, so your File Open will simply error out on that as it can't find the file (it might actually magically, if you just happened to select a file through the File Dialog Box in the system directory as that will change the application global current directory variable and the Windows user space API is known to try to resolve relative names relative to that current directory). But the problem with that is that it will only work if the current directory is set to the System32 directory, which it usually isn't. An error on this level passed on to VIPM will not likely far well with the installation itself. But the main problem is that I do not see how that could work properly when trying to build on 32-bit LabVIEW for DLL files that should remain with 32 in their name.

There is a Match Regular Expression node in LabVIEW that uses internally the PCRE library. It may not be 100% the same as what you have in Python, but that would be actually more a problem of the Python implementation. The PCRE library is pretty much the de facto implementation of regular expressions.

That looks nasty. Checking the PE file header would be one of the last things I would resort to. It also has the potential to fail for many reasons such as LabVIEW deciding to not convert the wildcard filenames in the Linker Info anymore, although I think that's actually unlikely since those paths are meant to actually allow access the files on disk in some way. But it's a private node, so all guarantees are pretty much null and void. Also I fail to see how your method would work with a DLL called user32.dll that should stay that way when your tool is running on LabVIEW for 32-bit. It will correctly detect that the DLL is NOT 64 bit, so use the 32 to search for in the file name, correctly find that and replace it with a *. Boom, When loaded in LabVIEW for 64-bit the VI will look for user64.dll and that will not work. Also don't try to read the file for the non-Windows cases as you don't do anything with that anyhow! The best we may be able to do here is to simply detect if it is a relative path with only one path element (it is for system shared libraries correctly setup in the Call Library Node) and skip the renaming back to wildcard names for them. This may require more investigation for other OSes such as Linux. But there, multiarch installations are also usually solved by having different lib directories for the different architectures and not to rename the files for standard libraries. Only file names with absolute path (and hence not installed in one of these directories but located locally to to caller, MIGHT use the 32-bit/64-bit naming scheme. It's a kludge, but VIPM unfortunately has limited support to install binary files based on the bitness of the target LabVIEW version! Otherwise I wouldn't need that complete filename wildcard voodoo for my libraries. In the past I tried to solve it by installing both versions of the shared library with different names and having a post-install hook to delete the wrong one and do the renaming to the expected standard name. But that has other complications in some situations. I may still decide to revert back to that. This nonsense is even worse to solve properly.

So they would rather like to pay a yearly subscription (and have their developers loose access once finance decides to stop the recurring payment) than a one time fee and decide at the end of the year if they want to fork over another 25% of the then actual license price to stay in the maintenance program? Sounds like a typical MBA logic! 😀 But if you own old perpetual licenses and can proof it you get to actually renew them by simply paying the Maintenance Support Program (MSP) fee of 25% of the full price. NI has publicly stated that, until mid 2025, they will waive all late fees for lapsed MSPs (basically nobody could possibly still have an active MSP at this point after NI forced everybody to go to SAAS after January 1, 2022). The MSP is actually still slightly cheaper than the SAAS fee, and rightly so, people paying for the perpetual license paid royally for the initial license.

As of yesterday, November 18, the Perpetual licenses for LabVIEW and LabVIEW+ are officially back and should be directly orderable through the normal LabVIEW order page . But yes compared to before when the subscription was pushed down our throat the costs have significantly increased. I would say it is almost a 2.5* price increase if I remember correctly. The current Professional Developer price is higher than what the Developer Suite used to be back then, which also included LabVIEW Realtime and LabVIEW FPGA and just about any possible toolkit there was.

It just occurred to me that there is a potential problem. If your DLLs are always containing 32 in their name, independent of the actual bitness, as for instance many Windows DLLs do, this will corrupt the name for 64-bit LabVIEW installations. I haven't checked if paths to DLL names in the System Directory are added to the Linker Info. If they are, and I would think they are, one would have to skip file paths that are only a library name (indicating to LabVIEW to let the OS try to find them through the standard search mechanism). This of course still isn't fail proof: DLLs installed in the System directory (not from Microsoft though) could still use the 32-bit/64-bit naming scheme, and DLLs not from there could use the fixed 32 naming scheme (or 64 fixed name when building with VIPM build as 64-bit executable, I'm not sure if the latest version is still build in 32-bit).

I checked on a system where I had VIPM 2013 installed and looked in the support/ogb_2009.llb. Maybe your newer VIPM has an improved ogb_2009.llb. Also check out the actual post I updated the image.

Not quite! It's better to actually modify the Copy Resource Files and Relink.vi. Just add an additional case structure to handle shared libraries. The VI in question is this one: This will unconditionally change the linking name of all shared libraries in your build. There is a possibility that that is not desired although I can't think of a reason why that could be a problem right now. Fixup Shared Library Name.vi

There is to my knowledge no way to modify the JKI Builder. Although I think they did fix in recent years a bug that sounded exactly like what I ran across. But the JKI Builder has many other limitations that I'm not fond of so I still rely on my own setup. I basically use ogrsc_builder_3.0.0.11 for the renaming of the VI hierarchy with the opglib prefix with one modifications and then a heavily modified version of the OpenG Package Builder to package everything into the OpenG package. One caveat here, the ogrsc_builder_3.0.0 is from ca. 2009 times (and in 8.6 source code version). It will likely not go well with modern lvclass' and lvlib's and even more likely with lvlibp's files. It does have support for at least lvclass and lvlib but that is most likely fairly unmature seeing when it was last touched. lvclass and lvlib still were fairly new back then and had several quirks even in LabVIEW itself. I changed deep in the belly of the OpenG Builder in OpenG\build\ogb.llb\Copy Resource Files and Relink VIs__ogb.vi, that for shared library names the file name is changed back to the previous <file name>*.* with some magic to detect the 32 or 64 in the file name if present. It's not fail safe and for that not a fix that I would propose for inclusion in a public tool, but it does the job for me. What basically goes wrong is that when LabVIEW loads the VIs, it replaces to magic place holders with the real values in the paths in the VIs in memory and when you then Read the Linker Info to massage that for renaming VIs, you receive these new fully resolved paths and when you then write back the modified linker info you cement the not-platform neutral naming into the VIs and save it to disk. The OpenG Package Builder modifications mainly have to do with a more detailed selection of package content and special settings to more easily allow multi-platform support for shared library and other binary compiled content. In terms of user experience it is the total opposite of VIPM. It would overwhelm the typical user with way to many options and details that it could be useful for most. I had hoped to integrate the hierarchy renaming into the Package Builder too, since the information in the Package Builder would be basically enough to do that, but looking at the core of the OpenG Builder in Build Applciation__ogb.vi will for sure make you get the shivers to try to reimplement that in any useful way. 😁 And yes the naming of the tools is a bit confusing. The OpenG Builder is the tool that massages an existing hierarchy into a new on with VI renaming and relocating them into a configurable tree and fixing up relative paths to be correct for the new names and locations, while the OpenG Package Builder grabs a list of files and simply pushes them into an OpenG package (basically a ZIP file with configuration file). It would be quite useful to integrate the OpenG Builder as an extra prepare step into the OpenG Package Builder but that is a taunting exercise.

The problems with the paths to the shared libraries should be fixed with version 5.0.3. It's a combination of using the <library_name>*.* format to let LabVIEW resolve to the right shared library with the first * being replaced with 32 or 64 and the second with the platform specific shared library file extension (dll and so). Also needed to fixup the linker info in the VIs after creating the renamed (with oglib postfix) VI hierarchy through the OpenG Builder functions. LabVIEW, after creating the renamed hierarchy, will store the fully resolved library name into all VIs, which of course is not very helpful as it pins the VIs then to only use the shared library that matches the LabVIEW platform used to create the package. Version 5.0.4 was adding a working low level API for supporting a progress interface to the storing of files into an archive. Version 5.0.5 was adding an extended interface to the Inflate and Deflate functions to compress and uncompress binary streams and control the header used (none, zlib or gzip). Previously only zlib was supported for Deflate and Inflate. Version 5.0.6 fixes a bug when dealing with UNC names that contain numeric characters such as an IP address in the server name. https://www.vipm.io/package/oglib_lvzip/

It's not listed in https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/bugs/24/labview-2024-q3-bug-fixes.html As LabVIEW user I feel happy for their attention to this. As OpenG ZIP developer I feel a bit cheated. 😁

Unfortunately yes. First signed up 50 minutes ago and started spamming about 5 minutes later, then spamming about every 5 minutes. Second signed up 10 minutes ago and just started spamming. Definitely related as it is both about Norton spam. I'm very anti violence but these guys really get the worst in me out! 👿

Unfortunately it seems not. They said both (the two I checked) that they were created less than an hour ago, when I looked this morning (GMT+2).

What have you tried so far? https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/api/rest/ documents a REST API to gitlab servers. Did you look at that? Did you try anything? There is for instance the JKI REST API Toolkit that should let you talk to this.

That's normal for cRIOs. They don't usually go lower than a few MHz. I still use them whenever possible, except for loops that must contain nodes that can't be put into a single cycle loop at all. Quite often you do need pipelining anyhow at some point and then often need higher loop rates than your final desired rate and you can always implement your own internal counters that reduce the loop rate further and updates the outputs with the desired lower rate.

Seems to work fine from here today and is very snappy too. Wish the NI site was even remotely as fast. 😀

It seems to start to work! Unless of course you have hired some elves that keep checking the forum and deleting any account created with nefarious motives. 😀 But it is quite some time that I came in the office in the morning and didn't get greeted by a stream of products of humanities lowest when opening LavaG. In fact there seems none, and the latest new member is already 21 hours ago and still has 0 accounted posts for, so he may be actually genuine. Just hope that the moderators new message queue isn't overflowing with held back posts. Although you can always hope that it will die down once they realize that it has exactly 0.0% reach factor.

That was regularly true in the past, some of the callgirl spam so far was already NSFW.

They finally found out how to spam every single subforum at least once in a night.

Not yet. I'm actually working on it. Did read yesterday about the opkg package format needed and got some ideas about how to support that properly. Next step is to get the necessary gcc cross compile setup working again and create the relevant shared libraries and do some tests on several LabVIEW versions. Shouldn't be many months, but don't expect the according release next week. 😀