Explorer context menu

[Mister_Rose]

In Windows Explorer, when I right click a file, I can open the VI by selecting an application from the "Open With..." item. However, whenever I run Labview 8.2, it removes my Labview 8.0 item from the list, making it cumbersome to start up an older project. (I have to start Labview 8.0 with a desktop icon and then open the VI).

What I would like to see is for each version to add its own item to the menu bar, but still leave the old ones there. That way when I want to open an older project, I can simply right-click and pick the appropriate version.

Alternatively you could have a handler that determines the version from the VI and starts the correct version of Labview.

[smercurio_fc]

This is not LabVIEW doing this - it's Windows. So, perhaps you should complain to Bill Gates, though I doubt that will do much good. Windows remembers the version of the application you used when you last opened a file. The application to use is mapped via the file types, which are the extensions on the files. Since the extensions don't change, Windows simply updates its mapping based on the last version of LabVIEW that you opened. The same thing happens to me with LabVIEW 7.1 and 8.20.

Message Edited by smercurio_fc on 05-21-2007 09:48 AM

[Mister_Rose]

All that context menu stuff is handled by the registry. The explorer application simply gets its information from there. So Labview can write to a registry key to add itself to handle a file type. This is why you can have multiple applications handle the same type and show up in the context menu.

My point is that after I run LV 8.0, I will see both LV 8.2 and LV8.0 in the context menu (along with a couple of others). However, after I run LV 8.2, the LV8.0 option is removed. I'm guessing that this is related to a program's behavior in checking and setting the registry key to make sure that it is the default handler for the appropriate file types. NI would need to strengthen this code to be sensitive to previous versions of Labview.

A rough example of how to do this is at  http://www.codeproject.com/w2k/extendingshell.asp

[smercurio_fc]

On my system I don't ever see both 7.1 and 8.20 as options under the "Open With...". This may be something to do with the 8.0 and 8.20 combo.

I doubt NI needs to be informed about how to do this. I suspect a better approach is to do something similar to Visual Studio. I have multiple versions of Visual Studio, and I get the option of "Visual Studio Version Selector" that allows me to select which version of Visual Studio to use to open a solution file.