How can I use an Access front end and Access button to control a LabView Shared variable boolean?

[PatrickLye]

My company has invested a lot of money on the office network to write many many access databases and front ends. I'm looking for a way to tie a button on an access front end to toggle a LabView boolean shared variable to notify me when they changed something on their side of the network. I'm not seeing anything that helps on a web or forum search. They don't like the idea of a separate labview control that they have to push a button on to let me know.

Thanks

[Michael5000Watts]

Hi Patrick,

While this is not the intended purpose of Network-Published Shared Variables, you might be able to accomplish this by writing separate accessor VIs for reading from and writing to the variable, making sure to wire the inputs and outputs. Then, you could build a DLL, making sure that you include the accessor VIs as Exported VIs and include the DLL Library in the Always Included section of the DLL Build Specifications. During this process, you will define the function prototype, which will provide the function call, required parameters, and return values. Once the DLL is created, you can then call it and its functions from another programming language (C, C++, C#, VB, etc.). This may or may not work, but it is the only way that I can think of at this point. I have included some references that may help you in this process.

Calling LabVIEW VIs from Other Programming Languages (White Paper)

Calling LabVIEW DLL From C# (Forum with Examples)

I hope this helps.

[PatrickLye]

Ok, that is way too much work from the sounds of it. I'll just set up a database table to pass values back and forth.

On the other hand this bodes welll for the security of shared variables on the network.

Thanks for the effort.

[mikeporter · Accepted solution]

Alternately, if all you are concerned about is that something in the MDB file changed, you could do something simple like have LV to check for the file modification date to change.

Mike