Wizard for the new Project Template feature

[John Lokanis]

Was looking into creating a project template for our team using the new features added to LV2012. Before I dive in an start hacking away at it, I was wondering if anyone has created or found a wizard to automate the process a bit. The only doc on NI's site (http://www.ni.com/white-paper/14045/en) I could find made it looks like a rather tedious process to do this manually.

I was actually surprised they would create this feature and not build a tool to guide you through the process of making your own template.

thanks,

-John

[Darren]

If you already have a project that you want to appear in the dialog, and you don't need to customize the second page of the wizard, then the XML is all you need, and you can start with one of the shipping XML files in [LabVIEW]\ProjectTemplates\MetaData and modify your copy with your project's specific information. If you do need to customize the second page, then yes, there is more work to be done, but you can start with the Actor Framework's customized second page code (referenced on that webpage) and modify it for your project.

[John Lokanis]

Thanks Darren. I will give that a try. Any speculation if a wizard will be forthcoming in a future release?

[Darren]

I have no current plans to write such a wizard. But if the demand is there, we'll look into it further. A few weeks ago I created a new sample project for a colleague as a proof-of-concept, and it only took me a couple of minutes to construct the XML for it. Since I didn't need to customize the second page of the wizard, that's all I needed to do. Granted, I'm already familiar with the XML tags, so I understand it might take a bit more work for someone creating content for the first time.

I do recognize, though, that creating a customized second page is non-trivial. Our working assumption so far has been that customizing the second page is not something people will be doing that often. If it turns out to be a much more common use case, then I agree we will probably need something more automated, or perhaps a more documented template, to start that process. The current approach is to read the webpage you mentioned, and use the Actor Framework's custom second page code as a starting point.