LabVIEW
Extract FORMULADT, MUXDT type information from CDD file
The simplest way to extract the data that you need from XML (the format used in a Candela .cdd file) is to use XPATH expressions.
Here is an example of getting the value from a formula node using the LabVIEW inbuilt XML parser. The "Get First Matched Node.vi" evaluates the XPATH expression and returns the first matching node.
Several years ago I uploaded an example program for extracting data from a .cdd file using the inbuilt LabVIEW XML functions, however I stopped using that method shortly after because it is incredibly slow in comparison to the something like libxml2.
You can find the LabVIEW libxml2 wrappers here: https://forums.ni.com/t5/Example-Program-Drafts/Parsing-XML-is-too-slow-or-is-it/ta-p/3492686
This is what the solution looks like using the libxml2 wrappers...
As far as the XML structure goes, XML is plain text. I use the free app Notepad++ to view it and set it recognise the .cdd file format as xml so it formats it nicely and allows me to collapse and expand nodes.
I used the LabVIEW libxml2 solution, which resulted in an execution time that was at least 340x faster than the NI solution! I was desperate for a better solution because I had 340 data packets to parse from an XML file, and each data packet took a little over 1 second to parse using NI nodes - almost six minutes! With LabVIEW libxml2, it took less time to parse ALL the packets than it did to parse ONE packet the NI way! (Less than one second!) I literally LOL'd - and I was glad I wasn't eating or drinking anything when I ran it.
There's a learning curve, but it was worth it.
