LabVIEW Viewer

[Kezar]

The LabVIEW Viewer would be a stand-alone application that allows for the viewing on VIs for someone who doesn't have a full-blown LabVIEW installation.  It would function similar to how the development environment functions on a 'locked' VI.

I've used 'VI Documentation' in the past, but this viewer would allow for live navigation, context help, drilling-down into SubVIs, scrolling through case structures, etc.

[Terry_ALE]

I think this is a great idea.  AutoCAD, Microsoft Word, Excel, Adobe and other applications all have freely available viewer programs.  I think LabVIEW should have the same capability.  Most other languages which are text can be viewed by a text editor so this is not an issue.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Try this:

http://lavag.org/topic/7132-vipreview-interactive-vi-preview/

It's not exactly what you're looking for, since a person has to make the VI available for viewing, so it doesn't satisfy settlesj's use case, but it does satisfy Kezar's.

[mstoops]

I am merely looking for the ability to perform code reviews. Perhaps even just a utility for LabView to output a traditional flow chart would suffice, but a real code viewer like everyone else would be very helpful.

[durin0001]

I'm having similar problems.  

I was trying to show some people a bit of code that I was working on but could not because the version of LV on the machine available was 2010 and I developed it in 2011.  An excellent opportunity to turn some new programmers on to LabVIEW was quickly squashed.

We also have the issue in peer reviews. I want people to be able to look through the code but not modify it, or don't want to have to produce a license for everyone who is reviewing it. Also, when we perform the reviews it's usually in a conference room where the dev environment is not available, so we need to check out a license from the license server to a laptop and carry that into the room, where it would be much easier to just use a viewer.

This would be a big help.  Kudos!

[MrQuestion]

I think this is a serious issue with any company that needs to perform peer code reviews.

I just went through a code review where I used LabVIEW RT and LabVIEW FPGA. We have floating licenses for regular LV, but not for the RT and FPGA. It really complicated everything. What quality group out there wants to spend thousands on a license to review code? (when i say 'quality group' i'm talking about the guys that make sure you have the correct copyright notice, color schema, proper formatting, no ugly comments, bad wires, extra, ironically usually nothing to do with working code)

Another issue is that I may be developing LabVIEW FPGA code, and a co worker may be developing regular LabVIEW code to work with my FPGA code. He can not double check my LabVIEW code to confirm that he is sending data to my FPGA that is formatted correctly.

Sure, proper documentation would prevent the need for this. But, sometimes it's just quicker to look at code instead of pages of documents. For example it should only take a second for the guy developing the LabVIEW code for the PC to open up my LabVIEW FPGA code and determine that the i2c data that he is sending me should be in little indian format instead of big indian.

Also, this makes it dificult to compete with ALL OTHER TEXT BASED LANGUAGES!!!

So, you don't have Microsoft Visual Studio installed to look at source for c#? Gues what, view the code anyways in NOTEPAD!!!

For the software guys developing the labview code, this shouldn't be all this complex. If for some reason it's to hard to create a free viewer that's less than 4Gb to download why not save a series of jpg images encoded in your binary data of the VI on every save?  Then all you need is an intelegent viewer to properly parse the images and have active hot spots on the jpg to mimic the source code.

[mjochinsen]

A simple way to provide a "Viewer " would consist of:

- upload the vi file to a National Instruments server

- at the NI server, Labview opens the vi 

- the server sends back a screenshot of the Front Panel and Block Diagram

It could offer the option of which Labview version the user would like to open the vi.

It should be reasonably simple to implement and requires no extra software development.

There are many websites that provide similar service for other file formats. For example: CAD files, PCB Gerber files, etc.

[RavensFan]

And how would you view another case in a case structure or an event in an event structure? Or another tab on a tab control? You are stuck only view a screenshot of what is currently shown on the VI.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Has anyone checked out the link I posted earlier?

http://lavag.org/topic/7132-vipreview-interactive-vi-preview/

The preview tool really does work well for this sort of thing -- and, yes, it allows you to view the other frames of structures. And for Mr Question's developer use case, it would be easy enough to set up one copy of LV FPGA on a network machine and use VI Server to call over to that copy, ask it to run the previewer on a given VI and then retrieve the view. I admit it could be tedious for a large code review to go through that, but you could automate generating the previews for a larger hierarchy.

One more thing -- if all you need to do is check the VI diagrams, the VIs that you write for FPGA will load into LabVIEW without FPGA installed. They may be broken because they are missing subVIs, but they will load so you can view them and even write and save comments on the block diagrams.

None of the above should be taken as me voting one way or another on the general idea of a viewer. I'm totally ambivalent about the idea. It's worth building if customers would use it. I was in LV R&D when we had a viewer... nearly no one used it... maybe more people would use it today. But just about everyone who claims they just want a viewer also really (though they don't say it explicitly at first) wants edit abilities or a limited "run it and watch execution highlighting" and stuff like that, which slowly evolves toward "just give me a full LabVIEW, but give it away for free because I'm just using it for this limited use case." 🙂

[crossrulz]

And then you are getting into this realm:http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Noncommercial-Hobby-Home-license-for-LabVIEW/idi-p/110...

[mjochinsen]

RavensFan,

That definitely would be a limitation. Still could be useful for simple VIs (examples and discussion uploads)

What about a remote VI Viewer... something like Remote Desketop?