LabVIEW
project search order
Good Morning,
I was asked a question regarding how LabVIEW projects search for included vi's in their dependencies. At my current customer we have a heirarchy of programs and vi's on a shared network drive. When we are going to do work on part of the project the current practice is to download the whole heirarchy to the destination computer to work on it. What we have seen, and what I, as the most senior LabVIEW programmer was asked, was "why when the project is loaded, do we get warnings that it found "file x" at one location, then the next time it is downloaded it and opened we get a warning that it found it elsewhere"? One in particular loads a .dll, which is present in the Windows\system32 machine on each machine that work is performed on, and yet it will search and find, on random occasions, a copy that is in a folder in the Project (The Project, not the LabVIEW project) directory. Since this .dll call is in a vi that isn't edited, and as changing the path is more involved than a fairly high level "replace this vi"I'm using it for an example, but it is rare that we don't get a warning. We are moving towards implementing a more rigorous CM management system, but since some of these files will be resident on the target machines, I've been tasked with trying to get a handle on the question.
Thanks,
Hello,
I believe that this document should answer most of your questions: Best Practices for Managing NI LabVIEW Applications Using the Project Explorer. Basically, when the project file is created, it includes references to the location of the files that are included in the project. When you download the code to the new computer, LabVIEW first looks in the locations specifiied in the project. Since these paths have changed by opening the project on a different computer, LabVIEW then starts searching in the default locations specified by the VI Search Paths configuration. When it dynamically loads the files, it then prompts you with the dialog box you are seeing.
-Zach
