ProgrammingPrincess wrote:
> My company would like to store our libraries of vi's on a server and use a
> search engine (HTML) to get them while we are programming. I'm looking for
> suggestions on a good way to arrange them so they will get pulled up when
> key words are entered etc.
If I were doing this I would take a completely different approach.
HTML will show you static information about your VIs but will not
open them (well I guess it can but that is a lot of work). HTML will
not by default search for things (although you can search in a doc using the
browser)
the way searches are conducted is through a cgi script and META-TAGS.
All in all this approach will be time consuming and requires much manual
updating.
so here are some suggestions.
1) Create a VI tree for the VIs. This is simply a VI that has ALL the VIs on
it's
diagram. The drawback is that all VIs get loaded in memeory so if there is a
large number
you will run out of memeory.
The nice thing is it runs in labview, mousing over the VIs shows the VI Info,
you can drag and
drop from the Tree to your VI.
2) There are several librarian VIs that let you open LLBs and get the names
of the VIs
and some will show you contents. You can write your own since they use
standard functions
like the VI Server to get info from the LLB and VI.
3) I have a large collection of instrument drivers. Each instrument is in
it's own LLB and
several that perform similar functions are all in the same subdir (Like all
multimeter together, all oscilloscopes, etc)
This makes it easier to figure out where to look.
4) If you consistenly use the VI info, you can put keywords in there and use
the VI Server to open
the VIs and get the info. It would be pretty easy to write a VI that gets
this info and searches for keywords.
5) Always name your VIs to something useful. Test1.vi, Test2.vi, etc maen
nothing.
A couple of cautions here.
1) Make sure that someone in addition to or other than the SysAdmin owns the
directory
where the VIs are stored. You dont want to have to ask the SysAdmin to make /
incorporate
changes to VIs.
2) Make sure that only a few people have write permission to the VIs. If
someone uses a shared
VI , makes changes and then writes these back you will find yourself having
to constantly change
things and get nowhere.
You may find that you need some sort of source control if you have several
people using
the same VIS
Good luck and let me know if you need more info
Kevin Kent
_________________________________________________________________________________
UNIX is an operating system, OS/2 is half an OS, and DOS is a boot partition
virus. - Peter H. Coffin
