VIs in Dropbox, file-verison conflicts possible?

[werner456]

Hi

I develop my VIs mostly on my laptop, also at home, and need to use the VIs on a 12-core workstation at work. I want to have the latest VIs on both computers, and therefore Dropbox might be a good version to keep the VIs always synchronized.

My question:

What happens when both LabView-clients access on the same VIs? I need to run an overnight- data analysis routine on the computer at work, and meanwhile start changing and improving the VIs in the Dropbox-folder with my Laptop from home. Would you assume immediate conflicts, or should this work mostly without any conflicts?

The question is, whether Labview is doing 'in-time loading' of SubVIs at the time they are executed in the program, or is loading the whole code into memory and does not access the VIs on the HDD later on. I'm not using global variables. When the VIs are all loaded once, it shouldn't matter when the VIs are changed in between .

Does anyone know the loading-procedure of LabView sub-vis? Is this done in-time, or once at the beginning? Does anyone have experience with LabView VIs in the dropbox?

Greetings

Werner

[Darin.K]

I use SyncToy along with Dropbox to pass files around.  Works great and I can easily use a USB stick to have amother copy for the Internet challenged locations.   Added bonus: with a one-time setup I can use SyncToy to transfer IDE settings from machine to machine.  

[SimonH]

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@werner456 wrote:

 The question is, whether Labview is doing 'in-time loading' of SubVIs at the time they are executed in the program, or is loading the whole code into memory and does not access the VIs on the HDD later on. I'm not using global variables. When the VIs are all loaded once, it shouldn't matter when the VIs are changed in between .

Does anyone know the loading-procedure of LabView sub-vis? Is this done in-time, or once at the beginning? Does anyone have experience with LabView VIs in the dropbox?

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By default, LabVIEW will load all SubVIs when the caller is loaded into memory.  So unless you have changed this by right clicking on the SubVI and selecting "Call Setup...":

or you do any dynamic loading of VIs using VI server then you should be fine.

Your approach seems nice and simple and should work for simple use cases.

I would also recommend checking out source code control tools if you haven't already (I use subversion, it's free). It lets you check code in and out of a repository and can notify you when the copy you have locally is out of date and gives you the option of updating. Without this type of functionality I could see you getting into a painful situation where you're making changes at home and don't quite finish. If you save you'll break the working, older version at work, if you don't save you lose your local changes, and if you rename you risk confusing yourself or LabVIEW as to which is the "correct" version.

Good luck, let us know how this works out for you,

~Simon