what toolboxes do i need to run my code

[phoenix777]

hi

 is there any way to tell what toolboxes i need to run a script. The script is quite large with nested VIs running on an old version of labview (2007) with all the toolboxes installed. We are looking to upgrade labview but obviously we dont want to purchase a load of toolboxes we dont need. Any idea how i can tell which ones are needed to run the script?

[0utlaw]

Hello phoenix777,

If you have access to a "working" system with all toolkits and modules installed, there is a VI Analyzer test that will report the toolkits used by an application. Even if you don't have access to the VI Analyzer, you should be able to check what software is currently installed on that system via the NI License Manager, which should have a list of all currently installed and activated toolkits and modules.

If you've inherited code then things are a bit trickier- ideally the original developer would have documented what the required toolkits were- as with every other programming language I'm aware of, LabVIEW isn't currently capable of determining where a missing file was originally from - it just knows that it isn't currently available. Most NI-provided functions should be easily searchable on the web, so if have a basic LabVIEW install and VIs are reported as "Missing" you should be able to do some searching and determine which dependencies there are.

Luckily, just about every NI Toolkit has a free 45-day demo, so another (and probably easier approach) is to install the evaluation version of the NI Developer Suite on a test machine and run the aforementioned VI Analyzer test. The downloads for the suite (including the VI Analyzer toolkit) can be found here:

Download Evaluation Versions of NI Software: NI Developer Suite Core Package

https://lumen.ni.com/nicif/us/evaldevsuite/content.xhtml

Hope that helps!

[phoenix777]

Hi Tom, thanks for the reply

yes we have access to a working copy with all the modules, toolkits etc installed, I just want to know which ones we actually use when running the program (and therefore, which we'd need to buy to run the program on an up to date version of labview). VI analyzer looks promising but it only seems to report that there are no missing toolkits rather than which toolkits its actually using! Is there more to this module that i'm not seeing?

thanks for the help

phoenix 

[0utlaw]

Hi phoenix,

VI Analyzer should report the toolkits used, but you do need to select the toolkits you're screening for when setting up the "Toolkit Usage" test - it defaults to no toolkits selected.

Once you've configured that (and re-run the analysis), you should see a "failure" in the Results Window for each subVI from an NI Toolkit. The failure description should include the name of the toolkit it came from. 

One thing to note is that I don't believe the test will catch the most generic VIs (initialize, save, close, etc.) used in the Report Generation toolkit for MS Office. That particular toolkit expands the features available with the standard Report Generation palette but this is behind the scenes and the top-level Report Gen VIs aren't unique to the toolkit.  It should still find any VIs added by the toolkit, such as the ones in the "Word Specific" and "Excel Specific" palettes.  This would also be true of any other toolkits that modify existing VIs rather than adding new ones, but off the top of my head I can't think of any other toolkits that do that.

Best Regards,