hooovahh

This doesn't appear to be "exactly" what was asked for. The tool you linked to does not generate CHM files at all (correct me if I'm wrong) it only makes HTML help files.

Oh my apologies. A Hoover is a vacuum in the states as well. However when I say my name is Hoover people some times ask "How do you spell that, like the vacuum?" I say "No like the president".

Sorry if this is off topic but this is the second time you have called me by my name (sorta) do I know you? How do you know me by my name? And not that it bothers me but could you please refer to me as "hooovahh" (or hoovah if you don't count the correct number of letters) other members may only know me by my alias and I think it was be easier if we referred to each other by our internet names.

The "Data Type" terminal in the read defines what the data type out will be. You wired a constant of a string with the value of 0. This tells the read VI that the data in the file is a string. You should wire your cluster to the data type terminal, then the output will be that cluster. EDIT: Also if you wire a -1 to the count terminal it read the whole file. When I ran you VI it gave an end of file error so they way you were calculating the remaining bytes was incorrect.

I (incorrectly) assumed it was a primitive because of the icon, thanks.

I've never heard of this primitive before, but I couldn't get your snippet to work. I tried in 2012 SP1 but it just added it as an image (I first saved it to my PC locally then dragged it to the BD). I opened the file in a PNG editor and I couldn't find the VI data inside. Would you mind posting a VI file with that primitive in it?

Just for completeness I'll add another way to achieve this using dynapanels originally posted here. With this method you can have independent properties on each graph/chart, and you aren't limited to an arbitrary number of VIs (64 in Yair's example).

This can't be done the way you described it. Every item in an array has the same data for all properties, only the value can change based on each item. That being said you can achieve the same look by creating an array of clusters, where the two items in the cluster is a string (with transparent borders) and a slider. Then you can bundle the name and the value. Attached is an example of what I'm saying save in 2011. Array Signal Example.vi

I always heard that using Variants Attributes as lookup tables was the fastest way to achieve this. AQ has mentioned how dramatic performance increases have taken place in 2009 and earlier to make searching and retrieving data using Variants. Here are a few links. https://decibel.ni.com/content/groups/large-labview-application-development/blog/2012/09/04/using-variant-attributes-for-high-performance-lookup-tables http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Darren-s-Weekly-Nugget-10-09-2006/td-p/425269 http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/pub/p/id/1495

Because Power Supply (and all other Actors) are Idle. (with a few exceptions) They can be doing work every timeout but I'd rather they only perform task when needed, this cuts down on processing. I can have hundreds of Actors all of which are idle, not polling anything. Also I don't see the benefit from broadcasting my power supply status constantly when I may only want it at the end of a test (to see that it is still stable). If I want PSU voltage for a UI element I can tell it to do it's thing periodically and push it to a VIG but rarely do I do this because I don't know how hold this data is. If I request the data and wait for the reply I know that the data I got was from the operation just performed. What you are describing sounds like a Publisher/Subscriber paradigm, Is this how the Actor Framework works? I assumed (from what little I've seen) that it was command/response using user events and queues. I feel like these conversations are beneficial, but difficult to digest some times. We all talk about what we do and how we do it, but it takes alot more time to put into text what we are trying to say and, concepts we are trying to share. This tends to makes posts long and it doesn't take long to fall behind in the conversation. Oh and I do like the idea of a Shutdown Actor but I haven't needed on yet.

No you are right, I didn't mean you need it as in it is a requirement, I meant it as you will would need it to prevent a dead lock, if nothing else was done. The other suggestion I had (about knowing when a shutdown has occurred) was my preferred method. If this is true then I don't belong in this conversation. I'd say the majority of my messages have a reply that a Actor will wait for. When I ask my Power Supply Actor for the current state I wait for it to tell me the current state before moving on. When I ask the DAQ to take a measurement I wait to get the value back before asking for the next value. When I tell the Sequencer to "Start Test" I don't wait for a reply. That being said I still think it would be a fun experiment. Implement this with some OO or a DVR and have a central place with all states. I already have something similar for the Actor messages. I have an Actor that will intercept all messages between actors (along with the data send/received) and then I can display it using the handy Variant Probe. Then during debug I can turn this on and can see at a higher level what is happening. This is only turned on during debugging because it is not a circular buffer and could grown forever. I've been meaning to fix that at some point.

I explicitly avoided saying Actor throughout my post because not all of us use the Actor Frame work, and one could design the messaging framework in the way I described...and some of us have. In my experiences I've never needed to completely destroy a loop, just call the cleanup and init. So I may have my logger close what it is doing and re-read settings but it is always running and listening for other "Actors" to respond to. My example was a little simplistic. Lets try this instead, a Sequencing Actor calls a DAQ Actor to read some values, the DAQ Actor reads the values then sends them back to the Sequencing Actor with any error that may have happened in the read. I was trying to say that if shutdown happens the DAQ may shutdown, but my call from Sequencing to DAQ will wait forever waiting for the DAQ to reply with the data it requested. Previously I used DAQ and Logging in my example but this makes less sense because I couldn't imagine a time when the DAQ would call Logging and want a reply. I like this idea but I would want all states transitioned. So I can see what cases in my state machine, in each Actor went where, then where then where etc. This then can give a very detailed view of what states my Actor went to and usually tell me why based on decisions that could have made it do those cases. This central location of states and Actors would need to be a circular buffer of some kind, or possibly logged to TDMS and overwritten, or even just turned on manually. This could open up all kinds of debugging tools. Imagine if the User of my software has a bug that is reproducible I could say turn on this checkbox then make the bug happen. Then this one file could show all the states all actors went to, and with that I can very quickly narrow down what is happening. I have done this in the past when I expect an error by using the History Probe. Here I will probe the states wire (assuming I use strings as my state) and this probe will show all states that were executed by the Actor. Of course this only works when running in source, but with a State Transition Actor I could use this in an EXE.

I'm not sure if this helps or muddies the waters. One thing to think about is lets say you have your shutdown message is sent, and your logging part shuts down, but it shuts down, before the DAQ part finishes. The DAQ part could send a message to the logging part waiting for a reply (not sure what kind of message DAQ would wait for a reply for but this is an example) Your DAQ code could wait forever for your logging part to reply and it never will because it has already shutdown. For this reason your messaging system either needs a long timeout in case something goes wrong so you don't wait forever, or have your messaging system be aware of the shutdown messages, and reply to messages that need replies saying to perform the shutdown, without needing the logging part of the code to be running. This brings up another opinion of mine, and that is that separate running parts of code should never shutdown, unless they all shutdown. So say there was an error in logging and you ran clean up, and this caused the logging code to close and stop. Now we have the same problem as before where DAQ may ask for something from the logging code and it will never see a reply. I've seen in the past were an error would kill some code, but you need to remember other parts of the code may need it to reply or receive messages. EDIT: Also in my setup each parallel process handles its own errors if the error was not generated by another caller. So DAQ asks logger for something that generates an error, this causes logger to send the error back to DAQ where the error is handled. If logger generated an error on its own it will handle its own error (it has no place to send it). Having a central error system is a novel idea but I too would be worried about system slow down. In my setup any part of the code that will run often should be as streamline as possible. So the messaging system is very minimal because I expect messages to happen all the time. I've also thought about having a central location to keep track of states transitioned in each parallel process. This has alot of benefit when it comes to debugging errors but again I haven't done it yet due to the overhead involved.

Awesome. I modified the command a little to just get the ExecutablePath and ProcessID Processing this will be no problem thanks again. I do however have a new issue. So I modified my VI be like Phillip showed, and it works when I run the VI, but if I run from the Tools Menu I get "LabVIEW: Configuration token not found." I believe this is because from the Tools Menu I have a new Application which for some reason doesn't like that function (possibly a limitation of the private method). I can get the "App.MenuLaunchApp" which will return the application reference that called it and then use that for modifying the key and restarting. This works as long as I run it from the Tools Menu in an existing VI. If I try from the Getting Started, this reference is also blank. I tried opening a new application instance, with the port settings but this also returns the same error. If I try debugging it then it works. I must be going crazy over such a simple function. Enable-Disable Private Methods Phillip Suggestion.vi

I noticed that string got cut off after I posted it but meh this isn't the CR. Again goes to show the Private methods I'm unfamiliar with. Even so I tested your code and it does have that dialog about quitting VIs which is nice. It does give the user a chance to save any VIs they have instead of killing it. I would like to point out that my method does takes half the time to perform the goal then yours...of course half in my test meant I saved an extra 5 seconds. In the future I will be using your version because it is less likely to cause lost development work. That's the part I couldn't figure out. How to go from PID --> Full Path.

Yeah you are probably right. I certainly wasn't trying to hide the fact that part of the code was not mine, and that it was part of a freeware application. I actually found the download on a site somewhere as just an EXE download without any attribution or history of where it came from. Still the whole two wrongs thing. I tried for a long time to accomplish what this little EXE program does natively, or using VB calls but couldn't find any thing, just some possible ways to do it in C that I couldn't get to work. For those not adventurous enough to run random EXEs off the internet, this EXE has many functions but the one I use is given a EXE name, it will provide the PID(s) for those running applications, and the full path on disk to their locations. If you open Task Manager you can see the PID column for all applications, and you can right click and choose Open File Location. This is the functions that I couldn't seem to do with DLL calls to Windows, or VB and .Net calls.

I wasn't talking about the App Data folder, I was talking about normal NI installers and how standard operation is for now with applications I make. I was saying that normally someone would need to change the permissions on the INI file in the Program Files folder if the application is going to Read/Write it. This was done using the command line program icacls but using the "unlock" on that INI file removes the extra step of having to run icacls but will still overwrite the INI (in Program Files) I understand how you handle INI settings and I will try to use something similar in the future after some initial testing.

I don't use private methods often, and as a result I don't know what other methods are available. When I do turn on private methods I find that there are a ton and they some times will slow down my development, because there are so many that I will not use 99% of the time. For this reason I find myself enabling and disabling private methods and I wanted an easier way to turn them on and off. I made this VI (and it's supporting code) to run from the Tools menu of LabVIEW (place in the <LabVIEW>Projects folder) which will change the LabVIEW.ini key, and then restart LabVIEW. Disclaimer 1: Private methods are not supported by NI and should not be used in build applications, and are generally only used for tools of development. Disclaimer 2: This set of code contains an EXE (pv.exe) and will be saved and executed from the system temporary folder %temp%. Information about this EXE can be found here. Disclaimer 3: As stated in the main VI, this will taskkill the version of LabVIEW running, and all unsaved work will be lost. Any feedback is appreciated, thanks. EDIT: This code uses OpenG File Library. Enable Disable Private Methods.zip

Sorry I can't edit my own post (too old) but for those having cross link issues like the one I mention, looking at the Files tab in a project explorer will quickly show any VIs not linking to the right files on disk so the tool I mentioned making isn't needed.

Occasionally I will be working on multiple projects that at one time split from each other. Because of this there will be many VI with the same name in both projects. To keep things simple I will only open one project at a time, but sometime I will do something stupid and have one project link incorrectly to the other projects VI. A tool I've wanted to make is to open a ref to all VIs in memory, get their paths, and build a tree with a directory view of all VIs loaded. This way I can see quickly which VIs are being called from where on disk. This type of tool could take advantage of this private method because I don't care to load all other dependencies when I open my references. I just need to know the path (and assume all the VIs are already in memory) that I want to scan.

It is very fast. I did a test on it by having it find all VI recursively in a directory, then open each of them and read the Connector Pane Image, VI description, VI Controls and their descriptions. Finding the VI files took longer than performing all the other operations. EDIT: Actually I had a bug in my code the timing is not quite correct. On a directory containing 440 VIs (in sub folders too) it took 71ms to find all of them using the Recursive File List. Then it took another 4.8s to open those 440 VI references. The time to read the data was a bit flawed too but is on the order of 8-10 seconds.

I've used icacls before for setting permission as well (before I knew about the unlock feature). What I did then was install like normal, and then I needed to remember to run the batch file to change INI permissions after the install. Unlock removes this extra step but again will simply overwrite the INI during the install (which is where this topic came from in the first place)

Awesome idea. Yeah I was thinking about how all of this would work when switching users as well. I have not run into this myself but apparently there is a bug with 2012 with the unlock that doesn't work properly. Sounds like it is planned to be fixed in the next release

This code is still locked. Your code was removed here previously because of this. Either unlock the code or stop trying to submit it to the Code Repository.

What I'm doing right now can be considered non-standard. The INI and EXE go into the Program Files folder, and the INI has been "unlocked" by the NI installer. This makes it so anyone on the system has permission to write to it (but no other files). I've known for a while that files under Program Files should not be changed after the installer because of user permissions issues and that the ProgramData is the correct place for this information. To be more standard moving forward I think it would be a good idea to try what bmoyer suggested. I can have the installer install into Program Files the EXE and INI and keep them locked to read-only. Then settings are read from the ProgramData first. If the file doesn't exist (or there is an error in reading the Section/Key) use the INI file in the Program Files. Then when making changes save to ProgramData. An added benefit I didn't think about with this approach is I can have a "Reset to Default" button that will simply delete the ProgramData INI file, causing the software to use the Program Files INI for settings.