how is the "find text" implemented?

[0_o]

A script that I wrote runs recursively over all the vis in a project and searches a string in the label/description etc.

It works just fine but the script opens each vi while accessing its reference and thus running over >1000 big vis takes ages.

However, the built in find option in LV searches text in an application and it only takes seconds thus I guess it searches the serialized vis and somehow knows how to highlight the relevant control.

Besides looking at the flattened code from time to time I never tried anything like that.

Is the search function open source and I just need to find it or is it a LV secret?

[Mr Mike]

Scripting can be slow. In the LabVIEW source code we search each object for the text we're searching for. If the text is found we add the object to a list and traverse the objects within it (i.e. search inside a structure). Each object knows which attributes are searchable. When we search, we search all loaded block diagrams, which is (almost always) all loaded VIs. I bet the slowdown is in scripting.

There may be a way to call the search method, since it is called from a LabVIEW dialog, and many LabVIEW dialogs are backed by LabVIEW code, but it's not public. You may want to contact Darren Nattinger and ask him if he knows of a method to call and possible make it public in future releases.

[Darren]

To my knowledge, there is no way to call the functionality in the Find Dialog in a VI.

[Aristos Queue]

There isn't. It's all closed C++ code traversing the direct object hierarchy. No hooks have ever been written for G code to plug in.

[asbo]

That's a shame On more that one occasion, I've wanted to search programmatically, but didn't have the time to try implementing a pure-G solution. Can anyone comment on how difficult it would be to add hooks in the future?