Exposing accessor vis as Properties in a .NET assembly

[pcqd · Accepted solution]

In parallel with this discussion forum I have submitted an E-mail support request.  Andrew Church did some research and was able to set the record straight.  Here is his E-mail to me...

Hello Peter,

This is Andy from the Applications Engineering department at National Instruments. I spent some time today looking into your question and wanted to follow up with some more information.

Unfortunately, at this point LabVIEW's .NET interop assembly functionality does not include support for accessing public class properties directly. When building a .NET assembly from a LabVIEW project, class fields can only be accessed by calling method VIs. This is not the case when LabVIEW is accessing a .DLL compiled from another OOP based language--in this case both properties and methods can be used. However, LabVIEW does not currently export properties by themselves.

The 'Calculator.dll' and 'EventExample.dll' assemblies were probably written in another .NET language, actually. So, unfortunately the answer to your question is that for now it will be necessary to use methods/invoke nodes to access class data from a .NET interop assembly built in LabVIEW. We apologize for any inconvenience. I hope this answers your question--please let us know if we can offer more clarification.

Have a good evening and please don't hesitate to get back in touch with us with any future questions or issues.

Best regards,

Andrew Church
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/support

I asked if National Instruments is working on fixing this deficiency....so far no response...

Peter

[rolfk]

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pcqd wrote:

I asked if National Instruments is working on fixing this deficiency....so far no response...

Peter

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Add it to the product suggestions on http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/idb-p/labviewideas. That is the best you can do to hope to get it in the system. That said, .Net is not a core feature of LabVIEW but simply an extra enabling feature. NI doesn't likely want to get into the business of competing with Microsoft developer tools, so chances for this new feature are dependent on how much benefit the product manager perceives this to have versus how much effort it would take to implement it. My personal judgment in this is that it may be added at some point as part of another round of catching up with the next über-cool super featured .Net version but has no chance to be added as an individual feature on its own at all. Don't expect it to happen in the next LabVIEW version as that is feature wise already frozen and only bug fixes will go in anymore during the upcoming beta cycle.

[pcqd]

Rolf,

I appreciate your insights.  I suspect that NI has many irons in the fire and this particular "feature" is, in comparison, a back-burner item.  I will add it to the NI customer "wish list".

Peter