2010 EXE cannot find control RTMs?

[TurboPhil]

I have a large application that uses some custom right-click shortcut menus for some of the front panel controls. I just noticed a heretofore unseen bug when brining up the shortcut menus for some of the controls. I do some user-event filtering to set properties of the shortcut menu (i.e. disable certain menu items based on user login, etc.). I noticed that the controls where the shortcut menu is saved as a discrete *.rtm file, get/set menu item properties functions return an "Error 1162: LABVIEW Cannot find one or more tags." For controls where the custom menu is "saved with control", there are no problems.

To further complicate the problem, I verified that the error 1162 message only occurs when I run the executable on certain machines. It does not throw the error when I run the executable on my laptop, but it does when I run the exact same executable on one of our generic workstations. I verified that all support files were present and the exe file versions were the same on both systems. The only thing I can think of is that it works on my laptop which has the LabVIEW Development Environment, whereas the workstations only have the RTE.

I tried building the EXE with the *.rtm files using the EXE as the destination, and also using the support directory. Same problem on both fronts.

So, the only other workaround I can think of is to switch those controls to save the custom shortcut menu with the control, rather than as a *rtm file. The problem is, I don't see that as an option. Once you create an *.rtm file for a control, it doesn't look like you can switch back to the other method.

TL;DR I suspect that the 2010 RTE doesn't like loading *.rtm files for controls on systems that don't have a full LV development install.

Can anyone else verify this behavior? And does anyone have any suggestions for workarounds?

[GerdW]

Hi Phil,

I had a very similar problem with LV2009, see here for a workaround solution...

[TurboPhil]

Thanks for the response. I did see your post, but thanks for pointing it out. It sounded like you had to programmatically create the menu every time you run your EXE, which is not exactly the ideal solution. I was hoping that someone else may have found a different workaround. So far, it looks like the only way to get around it is to delete the original control, then create a new one and edit the shortcut menu, then choose save with control when saving the menu.

Ideally, there would be no need to even worry about this at all. But, the next most ideal situation would be to offer the capability to switch from having an external *.rtm file or having the menu saved with the control. As far as I can tell, once you save the menu to a separate file, there's no going back. 😞

[Joe_S]

TurboPhil,

That workaround should work for your application.  As far as losing the RTMs when building an application, the issue has been reported to our R&D department and they are looking into resolving it.  For your reference, the CAR# is 256160.  You can hold on to that number and each time we release an update for LabView, we also give a list of CARs addressed in the update, so you can check that number against the list to see if the update includes this issue.  Thanks for pointing it out, though!

Regards,

Joe S.

[DonRoth]

Has this been fixed in LabVIEW 2011? My right-click menus on a table control are also not spawning in the executable.

Don

[_enigma_]

DonRoth,

This is Alexander M with National Instruments.  Unforturnately the issue referenced in CAR #256160 was not resolved in LabVIEW 2011.  A fix is in the works and the target release for fix is LabVIEW 2012.

Regards,

Alexander M

Applications Engineer

National Instruments

[DonRoth]

OK - so I built the menu at run-time using the following approach and the menu spawns properly upon right-click in the EXE:

However, the 'export data to excel' and 'export data to clipboard' commands do not work as they do in the development enviroment.

Should I file a separate bug report?

Don

[Michael-B]

Hello Don!

Go ahead and report this as a different issue.

[Michael-B]

Using the method that Don proposed, I was able to successfully use the 'export data to excel' and 'export data to clipboard' commands.  Those two commands worked the same for me in an executable as they did in the development environment.  It's possible that the behavior disparity could result from a configuration issue with the operating system or MS Office.