VI Task Manager

[Thoric]

Quite often I find myself running a new bit of code which contains an untested modal subvi somewhere in it's bowels, to find that the when called the modal subvi doesn't exit. Clearly there's a little bug in my code, but now I'm stuck. The modal vi has all the focus of LabVIEW, I can't close the vi, I can't abort the vi. Nothing is accessible, including the Project Explorer window.

Now what I need here is a LabVIEW Running VIs Task Manager, which allows me to simply scroll down a list of open and running vis, and abort the one that's stealing my focus.

It would probably have to operate outside the development environment to avoid being supressed itself, but presumably a standalone executable can link into LabVIEW through the server port and access the list of running vis with server calls.

This would save me from having to use Windows Task Manager and killing LabVIEW (and potentially any unsaved work)

[fabric]

Ha! I read your new idea a few days ago thinking: "Hey, that sounds familiar... haven't I heard that somewhere before?" 

[James_W]

I have to add to this... I have been aware of Darren's post for years now and while it is really good, it does have it's limitations:

1) If you have multiple instances of LabVIEW open, it will only launch in the last LabVIEW environment (currently open) to launch - which is not necessarily the environment where the problem lies.

2) It only allows killing of the top level VI - on safety critical systems this is really bad and often requires a full H/W powerdown FIRST, before the abort.

The total inability to get past the modal VI means that the global safe shutdown mechanism can't be activated from somewhere else.

Just changing the VI from modal to not modal would allow 90% of the issues to be resolved as we could the run a VI abort through property nodes on the VI after safely shutting down the system elsewhere as required.

Do we want to necessarily Abort a VI through a scrollable window - if not careful this could kill the main architecture for 90% of basic projects