Is there any documentation for Support VI's in the LabVIEW Express VI Development Toolkit?

[daarya]

I am using the Express VI Toolkit with LabVIEW 7.1. I was examining the Configuration VI of the Simulate Signal Express VI that ships with LabVIEW. There is a vi included called "ex_Wire Con Pane.vi" which seems to determine the terminals that will be displayed on the connector pane of the Express vi when dropped on the block diagram. I need to do something similar with an Express VI that I am building, but I cant find any documentation to wire the inputs correctly to this vi. Specifically, there is a terminal called "all Controls" which is a string control array of control names - the order in which the control names need to be specified seems to be important, but I cant figure ou
t how to determine that order.

Can anyone guide me to where the documentation can be found for this and other support vi's?

Thanks.

[PJM_Labview]

Check the LAVA Forum website and more specifically the following post: (This link has been removed because the technique suggested is illegal. The only legal way to do this is the use the Express VI Development Toolkit.)

Note: It may or may not help you with that particular VI.

PJM

[daarya]

Thanks PJM - the article was very useful. But I still do not understand how some of the support VI's that are used with Express VI's that ship with LabVIEW are built. I'd be interested in knowing if anybody has figured that out.

[SVences]

Hello �

Can you point me to the Configuration VI where you found the �ex_Wire Con Pane.vi�? Once I see it I might be able to help you better.

S Vences
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[daarya]

Hello Vences,

The vi I was referring to is in the Configuration dialog box vi of the Simulate Signal Express VI that ships with LabVIEW.

[SVences]

Hello �

Let me see if I understand your question correctly.

You have a VI and you want to create and Express VI out of it. You want to know how to specify what terminals should be displayed on the Express VI�s connector pane.

In LabVIEW, you need to go to Tools >> Create or Edit Express VI. When the Create or Edit Express VI window pops up, click on New, select Create from a VI and click Next. Then, you need to browse for the VI you want to convert to an Express VI. Click OK. You will see that the Icon of your VI is shown in the top screen and it already has all the terminals that will be shown in the Express VI�s connector pane. The order of the terminals is determined by the order of the terminals in
the VI itself. Then, you can choose which ones you want to be Configurable and Expandable.

Now, it is possible that your question is �how to assign terminals in the VI�?
For this, you need to select a terminal in the connector pane and assign a front panel object to it.
Refer to Chapter 7 of the LabVIEW User Manual for more information on how to set up the connector pane.

Hope this helps.

S Vences
Applications Engineer
National Instruments

[Crystal]

Sadly, there is no additional documentation for those Express VI support VIs, so they each have to be reverse engineered. I'll do my best at describing the ex_WireConPane.vi {I'm not the person who wrote it, so I will give the best answer I can based on examining it for a while}.

If you look at the Source VI - Ex_Inst_SimulateSignal.vi and look at its connector pane, notice that it has 16 possible terminals and only the signal out, error in, and error out are connected. Each terminal in the connector pane has an index number associated with it. I'm not sure if the relationship between indices and patterns are in the documentation anywhere, but most of what I've learned is through trial and error.

Now go to the ex_WireConPane.vi as it is in the Configure SimulateSignal.vi. The string array for All Controls contains 16 elements where the index in this array corresponds with the indices of the specific connector pane terminals in the source VI {the VI Refnum input}. So if the Controls to Wire array contained all 16 elements (in any order) all 16 of the terminals in the connector would be wired (empty strings relate to that particular terminal not being connected to anything). The order (index) of the items in the Controls to Wire doesn't matter, but is very important for the All Controls array in the sense that if the order is changed in the All Controls array, then the resulting connector pane would have it's items connected differently (ie, the error in and error out wouldn't necessarily be in the lower left and right terminals respectively). So the entire purpose of the ex_WireConPane.vi in this example is to only connect the inputs/outputs that are necessary based on which signal type was chosen.

I hope this information helps. Please let me know if you have more questions or if I can help with a particular connector pane pattern or anything.

Crystal