Sorting Out Conflicts and Relocating VIs

[ColorMan]

We have one more competition to go and one or more of my programmers did something to completely confuse Labview.  Now I am looking for a faster way to fix the problem than hand-keying in all of the previous codes.

They called me over to resolve a conflic message.  When I looked at the Files tab, I saw that the project was saved about 20 folders deep into another users desktop.  In addition, they had plugged-in two USB drives to "Backup" the project and now there were references to VIs on each of the external drives.  So when they unplugged the drives were not in place, Labview went crazy and started building layer after layer of references to external drives then creating folders with the same IDs as the external drives and so and so. 

Is there any documentation on how to build or rebuild a project from VIs scattered all over the hard drive without dragging all of the references to those locations?

[nathand · Accepted solution]

I'm not sure what you mean by LabVIEW creating folders - it won't do that from opening a project, although it might do it if you tell it to save the entire VI hierarchy to a new location while maintaining the relative paths.

I would create a new folder and put a copy of the correct version of all the project VIs into it, along with the project (.lvproj) file. Then, delete (or rename, or add to a zip archive) the original files so that you're certain LabVIEW won't find them at the original locations. Open the copy of the lvproj file and then the Robot Main from the project. You might get some warnings about files found in new locations. If you get an error because it can't find a file, copy that missing VI into the project directory and try again. After you're able to load Robot Main in a runnable condition (the run arrow is white not broken and gray), Save All. That should get you a Robot Main.vi properly linked to the VIs in the same folder (or in subfolders of that folder).

Depending on exactly what your programmers did, you may also need to clean up the project file, by removing items that are no longer referenced properly and adding in the correct references.