Remote controller indicator

[Alec P.]

Is there an indicator or function that can tell whether or not a remote user is in control of the vi?And even more importantly, if and when this user releases control or is disconnected.

A little bit of background: I have a single vi on a dedicated computer that runs a piece of test equipment. Many users are allowed to login and remotely control the test stand. However, if this user is disconnected or releases control, I wish for the vi to stop the test and reset itself for the next user. Otherwise someone might start a test, the network might fail, and the test continues without anyone controlling or even monitoring it.

I have toyed with the idea of a datasocket 'network ping' function, but it complicates the setup on the user which is
not acceptable.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated,

Alec

[mikeporter]

One thing you could try is to have one of the parameters the remote caller passes to the local VI is the IP address of it's computer (this can be easily be obtained from a system call). The local VI could then ping the address it go to make sure it's still there. Pinging isn't hard, you can do it with the System Exec.vi function.

Alternately, you could have the local test Vi have several commands one of which is to start a test, and another is to update a watchdog. If the remote caller could send a start test command and then a series of watchdog update commands (which could be disguised as status reads) until a response from the test vi indicates that the test completed--at which point it could send a third command to fetch the test results.

Those are th
e two ideas that jump out at me--and of the two I think the second probibly has more potential.

Mike...

[Alec P.]

I will see if these solutions are fesable; I have to check with a network guy.

However one additional problem that I didn't explain was that I am not directly accessing the host computer. The remote user logs on to a Citrix server( we use that for security and uniformity), and this server has a Labview gateway that then allows the user to connect to the test computer.

I don't know why I always find the hardest ways of using Labview!

[Slawek]

I was wondering if you could briefly described how well Labview runs via Citrix. You seem to be the only one of this forum who posted the word "Citrix"
Thanks

Slawek