LabVIEW Developers Feature Brainstorming

[GuenterMueller]

The VI Revision History is a good feature in large projects. But the information recorded by LabVIEW is far away from being meaningful (especially when a typedef used by a VI has changed - This note should be exclusively in the Revision History of the typedef).

For that reason my usage of the VI Revision History depends on the size of a project. I typically decide about the usage at the beginning of a project.

So I use VI Revision History and SCC, but I never made up my mind to any "missing functionality".

[GerdW]

Hello gmart,

today at the Berlin (Germany) user meeting we had a small discussion with M. Neal (Product Manager), as he was presenting the LV8 app builder.
The new app builder has this version number feature, but I (among others) also use the revision history of the vi's. It would be much more helpful,
to have this property readable/usable also in executable mode, not only in develpment mode. At the moment I have to use a workaround, to get revision
informations also in an executable. (I use them to present the user a development history.)

So I would greatly miss this feature, and would be glad to have even more functionality!

[becktho]

I'm a bit late, but I also want to give my comment.

Basically I don't use the revision history. If a major SW modification is done and I later want to know what changed, I had to open the revision history of each vi. I think that's kind of annoying.

I use MS visual source safe and usually a separe document describing the changes. Doing it this way, I have one document where all changes are included and see where they were made.

What I wish for future versions of LV, is the possibility to have different SCC projects accessible. Now in LV8.0 I gave it another try (I first did in LV6.1 but for me it did not work) and had to discover, that I just can connect to one project in the SCC - and this was accessed from each LV project. Definitely not what I want. If each LV project could be mapped to a SCC project it would be quite nice. Then I would not have to open SCC all the time but could manage it directly from within LV.

Thomas

[Kevin_Price]

I typically use the revision history by setting up Tools-->Options to "prompt on save." 

When changes are minor (change names of controls/indicators, add comments, edit icon, fix aesthetics) I don't add to the Rev history.  When changes are more significant, I usually will.

As for usefulness, it has been a really big help only a few times and has been a little bit of help many more times.  I'm not certain if the sum total of the time I've put into the Rev history comments has paid back or not.  The time cost is generally about a minute or less but occurs frequently.  The time savings are generally many minutes or hours but they occur much less often.

I'd prefer to keep this feature around - it's already off by default for those who don't care to use it.

-Kevin P.

[gmart]

Kevin P,

Do you use source code control when working with your files? The impression I get is that people use VI History as you do - a quick way to track minor changes. In theory, if you use source code control, those same notes would be included in comments when you check in the file with your changes.

[Kevin_Price]

No, I don't.  It'd probably be a good idea, but I've never used a formal source control tool.  I almost always do solo LV development on un-networked computers, and have used simple folder hierarchies with datestamps pretty effectively.  Thus far, I haven't seen a clear benefit in dealing with the learning curve associated with a source control tool.  And then another one when the company adopts a new standard tool.  And again when the new release comes out, etc.

I do see that associating the comments to the vi rather than embedding them inside it can be a cleaner approach, but I think quite a few LV users are more or less ad hoc like me, and Rev History is our *only* sensible place for comments.

-Kevin P.

[DavidBoyd]

Well, I'm late as usual (I had never even looked at this forum until today), but figured I'd add my comments.

I've always tried to use VI History to add meaningful comments and I keep the 'prompt when changed' setting on.  I also use SCC (VSS), but I wouldn't want native VI History to go away.  As other posters have described, I may check a VI out of VSS, change/save it multiple times, then finally check it back in.  It would be a nice feature of the SCC tools if they could get the VI->HistorySince(LastCheckedInDate), and pre-fill the SCC checkin comment, so you could use the VI's recent history changes as a starting point.  In fact, there is/was a VI Server property with exactly that name (HistorySince), which IIRC took a U32 timestamp as an argument, though I think it's a private scripting property.  At any rate, it seemed like it should be useful in the SCC tools - don't know why it wasn't used.

I have also taken to the practice of putting SCC tags into the VI description which get updated by the SCC tools.  Of course, they're of the fixed-length type (double-colon), for example:

$Revision:: 5                        $
$Modtime:: 02-09-23 11:40           $
$Author:: Dboyd                       $

This way, I can idle the cursor over VIs in the hierarchy tree, and see the relevant SCC info.  I hope this doesn't give future LV versions fits if it messes up some internal CRC/signature checking, but it's worked well for several years now.

Hope this is useful info.

Dave

[thols]

Like D Boyd, we (2 ppl) use 'prompt when saved' to comment smaller changes, then when I'm 'done' or want an SCC revision, I check in to SCC (Subversion, TortoiseSVN). I have even made a nice VI that outputs all my VI Revision History comments since last commited SCC-revision from the VIs I check in to TortioseSVN. So I can use these comments and make a nice descriptive SCC-comment. So keep and improve the VI rev History! The only bad thing is that copy/paste in VI Revision History doesn’t work in LV8.2, must be a bug.

[crelf]

Sorry for the uber-late reply - I was just cleaning out my RSS folders.  I don't use the VI revision history anymore - projects these days are much more than just VIs (projects, documentation, specs, ini files...) and I revision all of those in SCC.

[BillMe]

Since we don't use LabVIEW for system level testing, our projects tend to be small teams, 1-3 persons. In this case,  a COTS version control package is more trouble than it's worth so we try and use the VI Revision history to full advantage.

Bill