I wonder if the following would be useful. How about a tool using a tree view control, which would present a hierarchical overview of a LabVIEW application in the left pane of a window, and detailed VI/Library information in the right pane. One of the details presented could be where the VI is loaded from. I could even see something along these lines becoming the main user interface for a LabVIEW project management tool. There are probably a lot of feature that could be included in such a tool that would be very handy to people working on multiple projects. Perhaps you could define project properties such as automatic prefixes/suffixes for all VI's in a project. Integration into a configuration control engine could be included. VI's actually loaded in memory could be highlighted somehow. I could keep going, but I think you get the idea.
Would something along these lines be beneficial to a lot of developers or just a few crazy ones such as myself? :) (Needless to say, what I am picturing is not original. It kind of resembles the GUI for many text based IDEs such as Visual Studio.) John Howard >>> George Gatling (Contractor) 03/01/04 11:05AM >>> Thanks for the great feedback here! It seems that at some point a save operation failed and caused labview to write to the temp folder. I rarely save things outside of the normal folders and never to something buried and hidden in Documents and Settings. Also the hard drive is not even close to full... some 10% full with 100GB remaining. But many other things could cause a file write to fail. Then I suspect that I got presented with a search dialog starting in the temp folder (although I did not notice this at the time). After i had chose the first VI there, the garbage path was now in <found vi>/* and so it likely started pulling sub-vis from both the main and the temp depending on which parent was trying to load the file into memory. This would explain the seemingly random pattern of temp vs main files. The end of the story is it took about an hour to sort out, but I did eventually fix it. >I think this is a very important topic, and if you have further >questions or gripes, it is a good time to cover them. Might even have >something to do with what I'm working on. > I agree that this is an important topic, but the idea of further questions or gripes is mindbendingly open ended. I can say on a very high level that I am not satisfied with the way labview manages files and filenames. It is much harder to say what would make me happy. But I will let it percolate for a few days and see what revelations come to me :)
