topic Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works. in LabVIEW

block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 21:27:37 GMT

Hey guys/gals...

Well, I had a VI wigout on me today. The VI is imbedded in a project with a couple of boolians out, a boolian in and a couple of values in.... went in while tuning a PID loop to make a minor tweak and hit the cleanup button for the whole sheet and it got huge. Thought to myself that was odd since the whole thing fits on a single screen, so I hit the cleanup button again and everything disappeared but a couple of the inputs, outputs, and a couple of wires. The VI still functions properly, but there's nothing left on the block diag. but a few wires and icons. I tired looking at it in the Navigation Window, but nothings there except the few wires and icons that just end on the screen. It almost looks like part of the block diagram was hidden like hidden rows in an Excel sheet. Any thoughts here? ...or am I SOL?

Thanks!

Chad

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Gregory — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 21:31:09 GMT

Try scrolling around the window a little bit. Sometimes when ctrl+drag to make a copy the original one looks like it disappeared, but if I scroll off the screen and back on, it is there.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

aputman — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 21:55:23 GMT

I wonder if there is a structure that was resized and is covering everything up?

I don't use the diagram cleanup tool to clean a whole VI unless it is a very simple block diagram. I do use it to clean up selected portions of code (i.e. items within an event or case structure). It is decent at aligning a lot of controls, wires on array functions etc. but it tends to not work well when there is a lot going on in a BD.

If you don't like how it arranged something, use CTRL + Z (Undo). It will put everything back the way it was. (Edit: I understand that it's probably too late to UNDO the cleanup now, but remember it for the future.)

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Bob_Schor — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 02:47:13 GMT

If you post the VI, we can all try to "do magic" and try to resurrect it. Or you can go it alone ...

Bob Schor

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Yamaeda — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 06:47:33 GMT

Do you have some case structure or similar without Autogrow? Is the code expanded outside this structure and thus hidden? You can use the VI analyzer to see if you have hidden code.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

jcarmody — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:33:57 GMT

Ctrl+Shift+N brings up the Navigation window - it's a ZOOM out.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 11:56:38 GMT

All good suggestions... much appreciated! VI is attached.. Thanks for taking a look guys!

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

RavensFan — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 12:19:30 GMT

It looks like you have a corrupted block diagram with objects placed ad impossibly large diagram coordinates.

Maybe someone at NI can review this and recover your program for you. Search the forums as this as come up a few times before. One thread was fairly recent. Basically when a diagram gets too big, objects just sort of get lost to never be seen again.

How large was your block diagram before you started making changes to it? Do you have a backup copy saved somewhere you can go back to?

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 13:32:10 GMT

The block diagram easily fit on a single screen without issue originally so that wasn't a problem.... I have something close backed up, but not exact. Not the end of the world by any means, just an inconvience since I use that same VI on multiple test stands. I do appreciate you taking a look. I guess I'll just rebuild it.

Thanks!

Chad

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Bob_Schor — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:00:01 GMT

This is weird. I've gotten a few pieces to "reveal" themselves, including a Case Statement with a comment "Based on motor signal ... the time interval of the pulse is increased from 5s to ~15s linearly ...", but when I try to save this as a snippet and paste it here, I can't find the Snippet, it is as though it doesn't "save".

I'm not entirely sure what I did to make things visible. I'll tell you what I had just done -- I'd opened your VI, used Find to look for an Add function, found two, but they showed as very skinny horizontal rectangled outlined by dotted lines. I used Quick Drop to replace them with Add functions, but the screen still looked largely blank. When I did another Find, however, it found two triangular functions that could have been Add functions, showing them only as dotted outlines, Just on a lark, I did "Move to Front", and a bunch of stuff popped out!

I'm going to Save As with a new name, and continue, but wanted to say "There May Be Some Hope ...".

Bob Schor

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Bob_Schor — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 14:38:49 GMT

OK, I've made a tiny bit more progress. I've found two Adds, two Subtracts, two Multiplies, two Ors, and two Nots. The Case Statement that popped up is about a screen wide and (I'm estimating here) 50 tall, mostly empty, with the functions at the bottom and another normal-sized Case structure at the top. I don't see many other structures, but I've not made an exhaustive search.

Here's a curious behavior that I don't understand (but maybe I should bring up the Tools palette -- just a second ... Aha, that changed the behavior. I was going to say that if I hit Ctrl-Shift (as through I was going to do a Move to Front), the cursor changed from a Plus to a Hand (scroll window) -- now it doesn't do that. Could there be a Tools problem somewhere?

I also am getting "During the last run of LabVIEW 2013, one or more internal warning were detected and logged". I've been hitting the Send button ... There's no option for a followup. Let me look at the latest Report ... more than 20 Crash Dump Files and two Text Files. One is helpful -- "Possible path leak, unable to purge elements of base #0", plus a series of identifiers that say Windows 7, LabVIEW 13.0, etc.

I looked at one of the .dmp files -- there is text in there, but it seems to be related to the build of LabVIEW + the files on my PC + "binary stuff" that is not human-readable.

I'm going to take a break from this for now. I may be able to work some more on it, or someone may be able to "uncover" a bigger chunk than I could do ...

Has anyone asked NI Support about this?

Bob Schor

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:09:31 GMT

Ok, I've made some progress as well. I made myself a copy and started playing with it... I have it back down to a single screen size, but most of the icons are gone, just lines that end and start in dead space. It's like the icon is there, but invisible. Wires start and end in the right places, but there's nothing there.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

aputman — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 16:21:53 GMT

Just something to try (i can't open your VI or I would try it myself)....Do a File -> Save for Previous Version and see if that does anything.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Bob_Schor — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 17:10:50 GMT

Have you used Quick Drop? [I'm assuming you are using LabVIEW 2012 or later, though Quick Drop appeared earlier, I think]. You should have a easier time of this that I did, as you have an idea of the functions that should be in this code. Try the following:

Open a copy of your VI. Go to the Block Diagram.
Type Ctrl-F (Find). Set Search Scope to the current VI (last option). Search for Objects. Select a Function from the Block Diagram that you think is there (there are two Add functions that I found). Click Find.
Notice how many instances it finds. You now want to go replace the "damaged icons" with "good icons", which you do with Quick Drop.

Type Ctrl-G to "Go" to the first Found function. You probably won't see anything, maybe a very skinny dotted-line rectangle.
Type Ctrl-Space, the Quick Drop request. At this point, the previous Step has the Squashed Function selected.
Type Ctrl-P, the Quick Drop "Replace" command. If you are really fortunate, the function will pop into view. If not, don't worry.
Repeat these steps until you think you've covered all of the Found functions.

It is possible that you still won't see anything. First, verify what you've done by repeating Step 2, the Find step, to look for the same function. When I did this with the original Add replacement, I saw dotted-line triangular (like Add) shapes.
What I did at that point was a "Move Selected to Front", Ctrl-Shift-K (which I can't seem to find on the Menu bar ...). The first time I did this, the Hyper-Tall Case Structure appeared.

Hopefully all of these suggestions are getting you closer to getting your VI back. Once you've got it back, start using some form of a Version Control System, like Tortoise Subversion (think how much easier it would be to do a Revert or Checkout ...).

Bob Schor

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

RavensFan — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 18:37:55 GMT

Bob_Schor wrote:

What I did at that point was a "Move Selected to Front", Ctrl-Shift-K (which I can't seem to find on the Menu bar ...). The first time I did this, the Hyper-Tall Case Structure appeared.

4th button on the toolbar after the font selector. The one with the yellow and blue circular arrows.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

Darin.K — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 19:13:24 GMT

Ran this through my VI fixer and it got most things sorted out. Had to tweak a couple of things by hand and I was not overly careful so triple check that I did not screw something up in your formula. The goal of my fixer is to get things working and it puts things back into order using the BD cleanup so the final appearance is at its mercy.

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

BowenM — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 19:32:01 GMT

@Darin.K wrote:

Ran this through my VI fixer and it got most things sorted out. Had to tweak a couple of things by hand and I was not overly careful so triple check that I did not screw something up in your formula. The goal of my fixer is to get things working and it puts things back into order using the BD cleanup so the final appearance is at its mercy.

Nice. I actually tried to use VI Scripting to move every object in to coords 0,0 and then BD cleanup. It broke the VI and returned an error. I'd be curious how yours works...

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:39:18 GMT

Darin,

You are the man! Looks perfect. Is this "fixer" a NI product or something you mixed up?

Thank you again!

Chad

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

chuggins1434 — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:46:24 GMT

Thank you everyone who put forth the effort to give suggestions and tried for solutions! I'm much in everyones debt and appreciate the attention and effort all put into this minor issue. A big Thank You one and all!

Re: block diagram deleted (mostly), but VI still works.

altenbach — Thu, 27 Aug 2015 20:48:18 GMT

@chuggins1434 wrote:

Is this "fixer" a NI product or something you mixed up?

Darin and LabVIEW is like Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. (See also) 😄