LabVIEW Resource Template Viewer

[Sparkette]

Buried inside LabVIEW's resource files are several resources with the type "TMPL". They contain information that looks like it could be incredibly helpful in figuring out the structure of many of LabVIEW's internal resources. They're in a binary format, but it's quite trivial to parse, so I quickly put together a tool for loading and viewing them.

Template Viewer.zip

For more information, see this page, which appears to describe the same format: https://www.mathemaesthetics.com/ResTemplates.html (Change the URL from https to http; the forum won't let me add http links for some reason.)

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

On 9/21/2020 at 4:02 AM, flarn2006 said:

Buried inside LabVIEW's resource files are several resources with the type "TMPL". They contain information that looks like it could be incredibly helpful in figuring out the structure of many of LabVIEW's internal resources. They're in a binary format, but it's quite trivial to parse, so I quickly put together a tool for loading and viewing them.

Template Viewer.zip 94.15 kB · 7 downloads

For more information, see this page, which appears to describe the same format: https://www.mathemaesthetics.com/ResTemplates.html (Change the URL from https to http; the forum won't let me add http links for some reason.)

Well resources are really a MacOS Classic thing. LabVIEW simply inherited them and implemented their own resource manager so they could use it on non-Macintosh systems too. So that explains why the ResTemplate page seems to nicely describe the LabVIEW resources. It doesn't, it only describes the Macintosh resources and many of them are used in LabVIEW too.

As to the resource templates, I looked at them way back in LabVIEW 5 or 6 and my conclusion was that most of them described the same types that a Macintosh resource file would describe too, but NI mostly left out the LabVIEW specific types. And it's not surprising, nobody was ever looking at them, so why bother? 😀