This is a follow-up more than a year after the original message, just as an FYI to anyone else doing what I tried to do.
I'm a scientific technical writer (independent consultant) working on a project to document testing some time after the event. The environment is regulated (FDA), relating to medical devices.
Among the support items to be submitted along with the documentation is a LabVIEW .vi file, and as is often the case, I am required to document the file(s) being supplied.
In this case, the test materials and equipment have long since been dismantled or re-assigned and are no longer available. At the time, no-one thought to try to document the .vi other than as rather poor screenshots (familiarity with LabVIEW is moderate among the engineers, but familiarity with documentation requirements and the planning required is low, so no-one thought to try to produce even the HTML version of a report, as was suggested here. And just as an aside, persuading an engineer who is trying to get a job done ASAP that s/he should document in detail what they are doing is a HUGE no-no, as any technical writer will tell you :)).
I went in search of some kind of viewer in the hope that this would enable me to reproduce the contents of the .vi file, and found references here to the LabVIEW Player, now since defunct, which is a great shame. A viewer capable of re-creating (but not necessarily executing) the screen view of the original .vi - similar to the way that Adobe Reader lets someone without Adobe Acrobat view PDFs (and where there are many excellent alternatives to Adobe's Viewer, too) is a must-have, no two ways about it.
I have tried, with the help of an engineer who was not involved in the original testing, to load the .vi into LabVIEW and the results are, predictably, not very useful, since the equipment and materials are not available - lots of big question marks where LabVIEW can't find and/or connect to equipment.
I would suggest that even a .jpg image, embedded in the binary .vi, showing the working image that would have been seen when the .vi was originally created/saved, would be a very helpful addition for people like me. If access to such an image was possible using a simple viewer application, it would resolve documentation problems for those who would otherwise have to learn a lesson the hard way.
Best,
Peter
