review OpenG "Remove Typedefs from Variant.vi" not working in 2009

[Jim Kring]

While upgrading the OpenG LabVIEW Data Tools to LabVIEW 2009, we noticed that the unit test for Remove Typedefs from Variant was't passing.

Currently, the (buggy in LabVIEW 2009) code looks like this:

The comment references a bug in LabVIEW 6.1 related to Variant to Flattened String. Basically, the old (LabVIEW 6.0) method we used was to call Variant to Flattened String and then to Flattened String To Variant as shown here:

In 6.1, we changed the Flatten/Unflatten method with a call to Variant to Data and this did the trick (removed Type Defs from the variant). However, it appears that somewhere along the way, this stopped working (perhaps this "feature" was really a "bug" that got fixed by NI).

Now, can anyone think of a reason that we wouldn't want to go back to using Variant to Flattened String and Flattened String To Variant? Can anyone think of a better way to remove typdefs from a variant?