Diffing Files in LabVIEW with Perforce?

[zenthoef]

I've read the sections of articles about doing a graphical difference in LabVIEW with Perforce here: http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/4631#toc4 and here: http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-1681#Graphical_Differencing, but I still can't get it to work!

When I right click on a VI from the Project Explorer that is checked out and select Show Differences... Perforce complains that it doesn't know how to do the diff on the files. I assume this is because I haven't told Perforce about the LabVIEW Diff features or the .vi file extension types. How do I this? Is there an article I missed somewhere that describes this step by step?

Edit: I forgot to mention, how do I use the Compare VIs tool in Tools -> Compare -> Compare VIs? When I do this it bring up a dialog in which the first field is the VI I have open. The second field is blank, and that is the VI that I would compare the VI open to. However, since I am using Perforce, the previous file revision are in Perforce. How do I tell this dialog to compare it to a file that is in Perforce?

Thanks in advance!

[nathand]

In the LabVIEW help there's a LVCompare.exe topic; under that, look at "configuring source control with."  Following the directions there will allow you to show differences directly from Perforce.  However, within LabVIEW, this shouldn't be necessary -at least, it's always worked "right out of the box" for me with no further configuration.  Which of the two LabVIEW Perforce clients are you using?  You may need to use the command line version in order for differencing to work properly.

Compare VIs does not work the way you seem to expect for VIs in source control.  It simply compares any two VIs loaded in memory.  To compare with the latest version from Perforce, use Tools -> Source Control -> Show Differences.  If you want to compare something other than your current version versus the most recent revision in Perforce, you'll need to execute the diff from within Perforce.

[zenthoef]

Thanks! That helped a ton. I didn't know the LabVIEW Diff was called LVCompare.exe, I thought it was LVdiff.exe, so that is why I couldn't find it!

Also, I was able to get this working with the non-command line version. I haven't had a need for the command line version yet, the graphical client seems to be working nicely.