LabVIEW
Does saving a VI correctly notify the OS? (Google Drive)
I am using Google Drive on several computers and I noticed that whenever I save a new VI to a synced folder, it will not show up on the other machines.
All PCs show "sync complete" when hovering over the google drive tray icon.
If I go to the folder and drag the new VI to the desktop (or elsewhere) and then back to the google drive folder, the sync completes almost immediately and the file will be accessible on the other machines shortly.
Just wondering if there is something wrong in the way LabVIEW saves the files such that other programs don't hear about it....
(This is LabVIEW 2014SP1).
I'm thinking that Google drive still thinks the file is in use by LabVIEW? (Does it finally complete the copy when you shut down LabVIEW?)
LOL a typo lead to a bleep
Sometimes with dropbox a file won't complete syncing and I have to pause the sync and restart it.
Not sure how Google Drive detects changes to a folder, but that is definitely not the task of the application that writes into the folder to do anything special. LabVIEW simply calls CreateFile() Windows API to open/create a file and if that is not enough for Google Drive, then I don't know why. Basically an application wanting to be informed of changes to a folder has to register with FindFirstChangeNotification() and friends.
One more thing: I get the feeling that the whole change notification stuff doesn't really work to well in Windows anyways. Almost all my Windows installations cease to automatically update the Explorer windows including the Desktop after some time after first Windows installation, even if I delete or rename the file from within Exporer itself. I have to explicitedly press F5 to refresh the window with the new content.
@rolfk wrote:
One more thing: I get the feeling that the whole change notification stuff doesn't really work to well in Windows anyways. Almost all my Windows installations cease to automatically update the Explorer windows including the Desktop after some time after first Windows installation, even if I delete or rename the file from within Exporer itself. I have to explicitedly press F5 to refresh the window with the new content.
Yeah. For instance, if I make a new folder and rename it, it will still say "new folder" until I do F5. And if I try to access the new folder before refreshing, it says something like the folder does not exist. (Which it doesn't, of course. "New Folder" was renamed already.)
Thanks for all the insight! 😄
For me this is a relatively new problem. Never noticed it in the past.
For example I made a small VI for the forum at breakfast and saved it on the google drive. Then I went to work and the file was not there (Yes, I even pressed "refresh").
Using chrome remote desktop, I connected to my home computer and verified that google drive is running and shows "sync complete". (This was the case on both machines). However going to that folder on the remote system showed the icon of the VI with the circular sync arrows forever. A simple drag to the desktop and back synced immediately.
Then I remembered that I observed the same (i.e. VIs not showing up on the other systems) several times in the previous weeks with files from my own LabVIEW projects. I did not really need the files so I did not investigate further.
Yes, this is a potentially complicated problem, because it involves LabVIEW (possibly flaky), WIndows explorer (possibly flaky) and Google drive (possibly flaky). Google drive actually does extensive logging, so maybe I'll try to reproduce in a more defined way at one point.
