Search the Community

I am getting started with using TFS for source code control with LabVIEW. I am using TFS 2013 and LabVIEW 2013. I have a few questions: What is the best way to move files from one project folder to another? The "move on disk" doesn't appear to be a good option. I want to be able to make file moves if needed and don't want my project to end up blowing up with conflicts. It appears that once source control is set up in LabVIEW that all check in/check out operations need to happen in LabVIEW and not TFS or windows explorer. Correct? I just noticed the "Include callers when checking out files" option. I am assuming that is probably a good option to select so that they callers will be modified and saved as needed. Does having files set up as auto populating have any negative effects on how source control is done? Unfortunately it appears that we are stuck using TFS for source control since the firmware developers are using it and it is a company application now. Any help or guidance you can provide would be appreciated. Thanks. Joe

Very pleased to see the New JSON Encode and Decode in the palettes of LabVIEW 2013. I've looked at using them instead of the various libraries out there and I'm in two minds whether I will convert my current apps or use them in the future instead of those 3rd party libraries now I have had a chance to play.. Let's start off by saying they work great They are orders of magnitude faster than 3rd party ones and they adhere vehemently to the JSON standard. It's the last bit I'm in two minds about. JSON is subset of Javascript (EMACS). Javascript is dynamically typed, which means that any variable can hold any type and although a string may have quotes around it, it does not preclude inserting it into, or operating on as a numeric type. Whilst the JSON spec does specify that string types be encased in quotes, Javascript (and PHP, for that matter) programmers don't really care and it doesn't break their code if they are present or not. Therefore it is very common to see quotes around numerics and even quotes left off of strings and most parsers will cope with this. LabVIEW is strictly typed and when the JSON Decode encounters quotes, it will error if you have defined the field as, say, a double. and then will not process any further fields. This is a right, royal pain! It also misses a trick that would make our lives so much easier and our code much simpler. Take, for example, the following real JSON stream from MTGox. { "channel":"dbf1dee9-4f2e-4a08-8cb7-748919a71b21", "channel_name":"trade.BTC", "op":"private", "origin":"broadcast", "private":"trade", "trade":{ "type":"trade", "date":1376196221, "amount":0.3333, "price":102.95507, "tid":"1376196221462784" ,"amount_int":"33330000", "price_int":"10295507", "item":"BTC", "price_currency":"USD", "trade_type":"ask", "primary":"Y", "properties":"limit" }} The "price_int"," amount_int" are encased in quotes when quite clearly they are integers and, more importantly, we need to manipulate them as integers. This forces the use of cluster elements that are strings and then to convert those fields to the appropriate type. It is compounded further since the structure is nested which means we have to unbundle all of the elements and then re-bundle to our desired types as we cannot use a single cluster definition. Additionally, the "date" is a numeric of the correct type, but that is not very useful in this scenario since it will need to be converted to a string. So defining that field in the decoding cluster as a string would have been a bonus. . This is the conversion using the native JSON decode.vi. This is using the JSON API available in the CR. The JSON API in the CR is much more forgiving in that the cluster, alone, decides on the type. So type conversion can be done transparently by defining the cluster regardless if a value is quoted or not. This yields a much simple, easier to maintain VI and, should the server generating the JSON decide to strictly adhere to removing quotes from integers; it will not break our code as it would with the native VIs. The native JSON decode has a "strict validation" boolean that states It would be useful if this boolean also disabled type checking of quoted strings. It would also be useful if it didn't stop at the first field it couldn't interpret and tried harder to continue. I could live without the latter, but not sure I can without the former - hence my ambivalence. Did I mention how fast the native VIs are?