How do I find out which toolkits are used within a vi/project

[DavidU]

Is it possible to findout which toolkits all subvis in a given project or top level vi belong to? I have LV8.5 installed along with a number of toolkits, some of which I know I don't use and others of which I'm not sure about. I'd like to know which toolkits I need to run a given project/vi, and which can be removed.

Thanks
Dave

[Rich_Silley_NIUK]

Hi David

Unfortunately there is no tool in LabVIEW that will tell you this information but there are tools that can make life a little bit when trying to find out exactly what VI's you are using. The VI Hierarchy view (View >> VI Heirarchy), will give you an overview of every VI you are using and all of the dependencies. This is the best place to start when analising what toolkits you are using. Hovering over each VI and examining the file name can give you some information on any potential toolkit used, see the attatched image for example snippets of a VI Heirarchy:

SVFA => Sound and Vibration
DB => Database Connectivity
cd => Control Design

You can see that the sound VI, which does not belong to a toolkit, does not have a prefix to the file name. I cannot promise that this is always going to be the case but it is a good place to start.

I hope this helps.

Rich
NI | UK

[Wayne.C]

Dave,

One way to do this is to make a Source Distribution of your project.  Build Specifications>>New>>Source Distribution.

If you set it to Single Destination - Preserve Hierarchy, it should create a subdirectory for each toolkit used.

[Rich_Silley_NIUK]

Thanks for that centerbolt, you learn something new everyday!

[DavidU]

Hi,

Thanks for your replys, they have helped, although I have run into a problem with centerbolt's suggestion of creating a source distribution.

In order to see internal labview vi's, you have to have the 'Exclude files from vi.lib' box unchecked. This works fine on a test vi that I created. The VI just had a single subvi from the database toolkit dropped onto the block diagram. When the source distribution is created all sorts of vi's appear in the vi.lib folder - I guess these are all used somewhere within the subvi and by the main vi itself. However when I try the same thing with my code (which is much larger, labview loads 1200+ VI's when I first open my main vi) I get the following error.

Error 6 occurred at Invoke Node in
AB_Source_VI.lvclass:Close_Reference.vi->AB_Build.lvclass:Copy_Files.vi->AB_Build.lvclass:Build.vi->AB_Build.lvclass:Build_from_Wizard.vi

        ->AB_UI_FRAMEWORK.vi->AB_Item_OnDoProperties.vi->AB_Item_OnDoProperties.vi.ProxyCaller

Possible reason(s):

LabVIEW:  Generic file I/O error.

=========================

NI-488:  I/O operation aborted.

Method Name: Save:Target Instrument
While it is creating the source distribution I can see, in windows explorer, that the source distribution folder heirarchy has been created, but when it gets to the end of the build (the green progress bar is full) it hangs for a while then the error message pops up and the entire folder heirarchy is deleted.


This does not happen if the 'Exclude files from vi.lib' box is checked, and the source distribution is created.

Any ideas?
Dave

[Wayne.C]

David,

Any chance you ran out of disk space? 

[DavidU]

Centerbolt,

I doubt it.

The distribution is being created on a remote drive with 8+ GB of space.
My own VIs are also stored on this drive.
Labview itself is installed on my local drive, which has 120+ GB of space

During the build (ie progress bar is not 100%) there are 249 folders and 51 files in the source distribution folder. At the end of the build (progress bar 100%) it looks like it starts to copy all the files into the source distribution folder. After a couple of minutes it gets to about 1514 files, taking up 36MB, before it starts deleteing them all again. Finally it deletes the folder and displays the error.

Is it creating an image of the distribution somewhere first?

David

[Wayne.C]

You might try creating the distribution on your local drive. 

[DavidU]

Ok - that's worked

There are a couple of caveats

1) It didn't work if my own vi's were located on the remote drive - I had to copy them to my desktop
2) It didn't work if the source distribution was created on the desktop - but it did when I created it in a folder in the root directory, ie C:\DistTest.


The final size was 82 MB, 2800+ files. This doesn't seem nearly enough to run out of disk space, so was it due to the different locations of the original files?

For what I want to do I can live with copying files across occasionally.

Again, thanks for your help
David

[Charlie_P]

Good Morning David,

I have seen errors similar to the one you posted when trying to save to a file path which is too long for Windows to handle (255 characters?).  My hunch is that it worked when you saved it to root because the path was shorter, not because it was the root.  The same goes for the network drive.