lvman

You can look here for a tool to convert set of subversion folders to Mercurial repositories.

Ton

Thanks. I was hoping for a wizard that would magically do it for me:-) lol

So overall, is it worth the effort to make the switch? Opinions?

I'm tempted to make the switch from SVN to Hg. It seems it's easier to find a suitable online repository if your using Git or Hg (bitbucket). Ultimately I'm trying to make sure I always have access to my repository, even if I'm on another machine. I also like the idea of a separate local repo for each PC.

A couple of concerns:

1- Disc space. Yes I realize hard drives are cheap, but I'm sold on solid state drives and they are not.

2- Work flow. I'm sure this is just a matter of retraining myself on how I use Hg (Joels guide is a good start). I currently using TortoiseSVN, and I would probably use the equivalent for Hg, so that may not be a big change.

Is merging a huge advantage for Hg? I stay away from merging in SVN, admittedly because I've heard it doesn't work that well, but I didn't try it personally.

I think the main push for me to switch is to host my repository online. Since I'm going through this effort, it may be a good time to re-evaluate the source control provider. My current SVN repo is sitting at 8Gb (multiple projects). The plan would be to setup up multiple Hg repositories (one for each project) on bitbucket.

Any guides on how to convert the SVN repo to into several Hg repos?

Thoughts?

OK, I finally finished a version of a document I have been promising to write. We put it on our site: OOMessagingCommandPatternStatePattern.

In it we present examples of the following in LabVIEW:

messaging with LabVIEW objects

Command Pattern (with XML configuration files application example)

State Pattern

Hopefully the examples will be helpful to some readers, and promote further discussion on scalable application architectures.

Any chance you can post the example source code? I'm trying to wrap my head around these concepts and an example would help.

Thanks for the great info.

What was the relative performance increase you saw with the SSD?

Tim

I did not run any benchmarks, but there is a noticeable difference.

Here are a few tasks that seem significantly faster:

1- Loading LabVIEW or MAX

2- Loading projects that have several hundred vi's

3- Opening MS Outlook. Doing any searches for email are almost instant

4- Opening Itunes

5- Dialogs seem to pop up faster

6- Windows start up and shutdown is faster. Windows becomes responsive almost instantly after you see the desktop.

Something else to keep in mind, some laptops have removable bays that are typically used for a cd/dvd drive. What I did is replaced it with a SATA drive bay. This way I could keep a larger hard drive for my large files and only use the SSD for Windows, programs, and data files at my discretion.

The SATA hard drive caddy could be found on Ebay for about $20 (for my Dell D830). When I need to use a CD or DVD, I could "Eject" my removable hard drive caddy (carrying my old 7200RPM drive) and insert the CD/DVD drive. Another thing to keep in mind is that a SSD performance will degrade as it gets near capacity, so ideally you want to have plenty of free space on it. Also keep in mind I'm running Windows 7 which has native support for "TRIM". Google for more info.

Anyway overall I'm happy with the purchase it will tide me over for at least another year, probably more. My next laptop will definitely have a SSD.

I just upgraded my 2.5 year old laptop to a solid state drive and it made a big difference in terms of responsiveness of the pc. Just something to keep in mind.

It sounds like you should make a separate VI for each type of unit, that overrides a VI in the parent class. If you don't want to include the GUI directly in the class, you could develop a system where you use a set of queues or user events to pass data, or embed the VI as a subpanel. Your description does sound like a classic use case OOP.

It's a function, not a setting, found with the other OOP functions in the palettes.

Thanks for the replies.

You were initially correct in that I could use the "to more specific class" vi. I was getting the error because I passed in a "unit" object that was not defined! Basically I had a "serial unit" input into my Add/Edit gui and I tried casting a "unit" to a "serial unit", but my "unit" object was not defined. I needed to make sure it was an actual "serial" unit, or create a "serial unit" object and skip the cast function. Hope that makes sense.

What you're doing should work. There's no reason your classes should be losing their association with their specific type if everything is coded properly - your serial unit should always "know" that it's a serial unit even if it's passed to a VI that expects a generic unit. You might need "Preserve Run-Time Class" on an output of a VI somewhere.

The problem is that my "Add/Edit Unit" GUI is different for each Unit. I have coded an "Add/Edit Serial" GUI that expects a "serial unit" input. If I try to cast my "unit" object into a "serial unit" before passing it into the vi, I get the error mentioned above. If I pass a "unit" object into it, it does not compile. If I make the input terminal a "Unit" object type, I cannot access my "serial unit" specific information.

I suppose I could make "Add/Edit Unit GUI" as a method for "Unit" class, and this will get over written for each child class of "Unit" ("serial unit"). Then I can pass in a "Unit" object into the "Unit.Add/Edit GUI" and automatically call the correct GUI AND have access to all my child specific methods and properties (serial port settings etc..). My thought was that I didn't want to include the GUI as part of the class but maybe that is what I need to do?

P.S. What do you mean by "Preserve Run-Time Class". Where do I find this setting?

I think that is the factory design pattern.

http://zone.ni.com/wv/app/doc/p/id/wv-1295

You build an array of all of the children of "unit" and populate a ring (for example) with each option. WHen the user selects using the ring, you can then index the array of classes to chose the flavor the user selected.

To configure each you can call config method for the selected path that invokes the appropriate over-ride VI to show a FP and let them configure it.

I'm not sure if any of tht helped,

Ben

Thanks for the reply.

I took a look at that presentation but I'm not sure it solves my problem.

It looks like the factory pattern has a vi which determines which sub-class to create an object from. So in my case I can select "serial unit" and I can get a "serial unit" object out. The problem is when they want to edit the "serial unit" object. Since I currently store all my units as "unit" objects (config class), when I try to get a unit that I know is a "serial unit", I get the error mentioned above. I think I'm coming to understand why this does not work. Say I create a new "serial unit" and add this to my configuration object as a "unit". At this point I think I have lost all my "serial unit" specific data, so when I try to go back to access my "serial unit" LabVIEW complains because the "unit" object no longer has my "serial unit" specific attributes.

Is there a better way of doing what I'm trying to do?

I've been trying to dig into LVOOP but I've run into some issues. This is my first attempt at OO design and implementation so I'm thinking I would get some advice before I pull all my hair out.

My objective is to build an application that could acquire data from multiple source. This application will have a means to configure each data source and load/save configurations to file.

My first crack at this from an OO approach:

1- Create class called "unit". This represents a data source. Class data is "name" and "description"

2- Create class called "serial unit". This inherits from "unit" but also has additional class data such as visa refnum, com functions. This class also has an array of "Channels" objects

3- Create class called "Channels". Contains channels information such as name, location, units, scaling etc.

4- Create class called "Configuration". This class contains an array of "unit" objects along with config path.

In my app, I start by creating a "Configuration" object. The user can then add a "unit" to the configuration. Now the GUI to add a unit will change depending on the type of unit they would like to add. So if a user chooses to add "serial unit", I need to somehow convert my "unit" object (element in configuration) into a "serial unit" object (so that I can access "serial unit" specific methods). I've tried using "to more specific class" but it gives me an error Error 1448: Bad type cast. LabVIEW cannot treat the run-time value of this LabVIEW class as an instance of the given LabVIEW class."

My next crack would be to change my configuration class to contain and array of serial units, array of daq units, etc.. for all my unit classes, rather than an array of "units". Is this the correct approach?