Neil Pate

Yikes! That is a weird bug indeed and would have been quite hard to find.

Thanks for letting us know 🙂

I did use the Web VIs to make a data dashboard several years ago. Pretty simple stuff, retrieval of data from a LabVIEW implemented WebService, and a bit of data wrangling and graphing. All in all the experience was awful and I wish to never go through the pain again. Doing anything in the editor was tedious and frustrating, and the built in web server stopped working many times during development (for no reasons that I could tell). Eventually I hosted it with IIS and it worked pretty much first time and then perfectly afterwards.

Definitely cannot recommend it for anything other than trivial webpages.

On 2/9/2022 at 5:05 PM, hooovahh said:

I like to reference this thread occasionally when people ask about web and LabVIEW solutions.  Since it has been a few years lets see if I can give another summary of the options.  I haven't used all these but just wanted a list of NI and non-NI ones that were available.  These are not all equal, and the intention is that here is a landing page where people can find tools and do their own research on what meets their needs, while providing a little history.

Solutions From NI:

G Web Development - Came from WebVIs in NXG's Web Module. Paid toolkit.

Web Service - Great for simple request response, but the UI needs to be made somewhere else. Included with LabVIEW Full/Professional

Web Publishing Tool - Simple to use, works on RT, but uses Silverlight and no modern browser supports it, just IE. Included with LabVIEW 

Data Dashboard - Tool for displaying Network Published Shared Variables on tablet devices. No longer supported.

Web UI Builder - Pre NXG no longer supported with download links missing. Linked to the 2009 Keynote. 

 

3rd Party Solutions:

Front Panel Publisher - Open source originally used Web Service but now uses Web Sockets.

MQTT WebSockets Connection - Open source. UI needs to be built by another tool.

WebSockets API by MediaMongrels - Free toolkit, MIT License. UI needs to be built by another tool.

LabSockets - Paid toolkit with trial.

Wezarp - Paid toolkit with trial.

WebPager - Not sure never used it. The original site seems down.

Websockets API by LVS Tools - Not sure if it is still supported, was a paid toolkit. UI needs to be built by another tool.

VIRemote - Appears to be a paid toolkit but has a free demo.

WebPanels - Hosting site seems down, LAVA thread linked.

Remote Witness - I think it was a paid tool but the site doesn't have much.

Thanks hooovahh. Now I am even more depressed. As a LV dev that list makes for pretty sad reading in 2022. 

2 hours ago, flarn2006 said:

You just had to say it...

Ouch. 

53 minutes ago, Jared Breiter said:

What would these types of buffers be called? I see that these and circular buffer are both FIFO, but the array in a circular buffer is not in time order (the index of the recent value is last vs: always moving right?)

In the case of a circular buffer your "get data" method would deal with the wrap around so would return to the caller data in time order (otherwise what would be the point).

This is a nice use case for a class as you don't really want to expose the implementation to the calling code.

I have something like this

ok ok I take it all back. Seems like a Windows thing.

Copying this from Notepad++ to Notepad results in this

which if I then copy back to Notepad++ I get this

I guess some applications sanitise the string before sending to the windows API.

1 hour ago, Gribo said:

 Notpad++ uses C style strings for the paste from clipboard

I don't think so as I can copy and paste with null chars just fine using notepad to notepad++

9 minutes ago, crossrulz said:

Yeah, but you are talking about pasting into other applications.  How are they interfacing with the clipboard?  We have no control over that.  You will see this same issue if you try to interact with a DLL that uses C-style strings (data will be cut off at the NULL character).

I should also state that the NULL is copied over if you paste into another LabVIEW string control (yes, I just tested it).

Nope. If I start with this same string in notepad or some other application it copies and pastes correctly. 

For example notepad to notepad++ works correctly. 

I classify this as a bug. The string in LabVIEW includes all the characters, it should copy them correctly. I don't think this is a limitation of the windows API 

1 hour ago, crossrulz said:

It may be valid, but for any application that uses C-style strings, the NULL character ends the string.

Yes I know. But this is LabVIEW which does not have null terminated strings. That is what makes this strange. 

Nice spot. It is a perfectly valid character though.

Anyone want to guess what happens if you try and copy and paste the contents of this string to some other application like Notepad?

String Copy Weirdness.vi

5 hours ago, hooovahh said:

I'm just glad that I was able to make a synchronous network transport mechanism that uses VIMs, has status, automatic reconnection, and can target applications running on different platforms and different operating systems.  All of this with no networking experience, and the amount of effort needed to make this was pretty minimal. 

Yeah sorry I did not mean to derail things. That sounds really cool and the more VIMs we get into the community the better.

7 hours ago, Rolf Kalbermatter said:

Actually the color distinction of a wire is not specifically between a fixed size cluster and variable sized cluster and if it can be typecasted or not. Aside from adding a fixed size cluster into another cluster there is also the case where you add a boolean into a cluster. Both result in a pink wire but are still fixed size and can still be typecasted.

I think the brown wire only indicates that the cluster only contains numeric scalars and can coerce into a similar cluster with the same number of numeric scalars even if their numeric type is not exactly the same. Not really a very useful distinction I believe but 35 years back LabVIEW (and most other programming languages) wasn't as strictly formalized in many aspects.

Total thread derailment... Hands up who remembers the great error cluster colour change. Was it 2005?

I now lump Network Streams in the same category as Network Shared Variables; generally more trouble than the benefit they offer for the various reasons captured above. I now prefer to do this kind of thing "manually" using the low level TCP/IP prims.

2 hours ago, hooovahh said:

If you go to NI.com/support then click "Manage your active service requests" you should see all the times you contacted NI along with the case number and issue details.  Hopefully the CAR or bug number is in there.  It is a bit slow at loading things.

Thank you, I did find the service request I opened.

Turns out I was mistaken and it never got escalated to a CAR. Sorry @joerghampel

For what it is worth, on a different PC I have not seen the same problem, so I think it might just be down to a bad install of LabVIEW. Super annoying though!

5 hours ago, joerghampel said:

Hey Neil, can you share the CAR number for this (LV not releasing closed projects from memory)?

Would love to, but I cannot find it in my email 😞

Do you know if my CARs are listed somewhere on my ni.com profile?

@X___good luck. I had exactly this problem when joining my new company. I went around the houses over and over with NI, most of the support staff had no idea what was going on.

I am not sure it was ever resolved. In the end I managed to get through to a human via email and they were able to help me with my technical question.

I think an important point has been missed in this discussion. The fact that the solvent name and density make up a "collection" of information (i.e. a data type).

@Mahbod Morshedi if you don't already know about them go an read up about Clusters in LabVIEW. They allow you to make custom data types where you can group together related elements. Maybe even a Set would be an interesting implementation here where you can look up the density by using the name of the product.

Don't be tempted to grab into your GUI to get at your data (i.e. reading from a combo box to get the density). Rather store the data somewhere else (on a wire) and just access it as you need to.

Disclaimer: this is some time ago so my memory is pretty foggy!

I had some very strange crashes on bunch of cRIOs in a lab. Eventually after much trouble I diagnosed the problem as being related to setting the system time! I had a routine that tried to sync all the cRIO clocks and every now and then the call to the System Configuration VIs would hard crash a system. I never actually saw it happen with my own eyes but I have enough evidence to be able to blame it on that. I cannot recall exactly how I solved the problem in the end, I suspect I slowed down the rate at which the clocks were set.

As I said, this was a long time ago though and the cRIOs were probably not running RT-linux.

You mentioned you have a GPS module, so maybe just maybe this is related?

After getting burned by the system with the USB cameras I switched over to GigE and never looked back. Multiple USB cameras running at full frame-rate is a recipe for disaster!

Thanks! Mine has definitely wandered off.

Am I losing my mind? I cannot find the VI Server property to change the visibility of the Toolbar.

I know I can do this in the build spec, but I want to be able to force this off in an executable.

I am being dumb, and it's obvious, right?

Sorry @FixedWire, I took a look at my old code and indeed I have LabVIEW code to read a hex file, not to generate it.

I have done something like this years ago. I will see if I can dust off what I have. My memory could be totally faulty though!

1 hour ago, Dataflow_G said:

Sounds like a cool project, especially with a real 6502 thrown in. I remember seeing an open source Apple II emulator written in LabVIEW: https://sourceforge.net/projects/labviewapple2/ Not sure how well it runs, but might be interesting to compare notes.

Thanks, that is a nice project; I had not seen it. I found a C64 implementation, but this Apple II one is nicely structured.