Why exactly does opening Xnodes give a license error?

[Sparkette]

When I try to open an Xnode in LabVIEW, and click "Why is Library Locked?", it gives me the following message:

You do not have the correct license to be able to edit this library. Please activate or contact National Instruments.

This happens even in the Professional version, which I'm pretty sure is the most fully-featured license type. Is there some special kind of NI-internal license type that enables features that are in the binary but just not enabled?

Edited June 12, 2012 by flarn2006

[Yair]

XNodes aren't officially supported by NI. They're an internal NI feature and NI presumably used the licensing mechanism to lock them out. According to this, it looks like NI won't even be developing them further.

That said, I know that people have been playing with them, so it's probably possible to work around the licensing mechanism. Look for what people did here to see how they did it. Specifically, try searching for "XNode manager".

[Sparkette]

Would that mean there's some other type of license that only NI has?

[Aristos Queue]

Would that mean there's some other type of license that only NI has?

Yep.

[Val Brown]

Would that mean there's some other type of license that only NI has?

Yep.

I think it's safe to say "Yep" also means "Explore and/or use at your own risk" regardless of what you might find via the search suggested above.

[Sparkette]

Yep.

So, in other words, there's a license that even the consumer version will recognize that will unlock additional features intended to only be used by NI employees. Anyone know what this license is called internally? Like the Professional license is called LabVIEW_PDS, and the Student license is called LabVIEW_Student. I've heard there's a (non-NI-approved, for obvious reasons) program that can activate any LabVIEW license; maybe someone could use that? For purely educational purposes, of course.

[gb119]

So, in other words, there's a license that even the consumer version will recognize that will unlock additional features intended to only be used by NI employees. Anyone know what this license is called internally? Like the Professional license is called LabVIEW_PDS, and the Student license is called LabVIEW_Student. I've heard there's a (non-NI-approved, for obvious reasons) program that can activate any LabVIEW license; maybe someone could use that? For purely educational purposes, of course.

Things like this have been suggested before. The thing is that attempting to break the licensing like this would be a violation of your existing license from NI. Of course, if you don't care about doing so and are prepared to take the consequences, then I guess that's up to you. But I wouldn't expect much help from other community members !

XNodes are fun to play with and it is possible to do so without breaking the NI Licensing system as there have been some examples of XNodes where the diagrams were left unlocked and it was possible to look at the code and figure out from those examples how to make things work. However, various NI folks have made it clear that XNodes are not the future so I doubt we'll ever get an official look at them. Roll on the next edit-time scriptable node !