Version-aware LabVIEW launcher

[Intaris]

I, like many others I am sure, have multiple LV versions installed on my computer.

I have often wished for a small launcher program (linked into Explorer.exe under Windows) which has a peek to see what version a VI (or ctl or whatever) is BEFORE calling the respective LV version.

It could also have an option to show a dialog whenever a VI is double clicked in a version different to a version of LV which is ALREADY open asking if it should be opened in the native version or in the currently opened version.

An alternative would be to treat VIs opened from a different version as locked (read-only), forcing either a manual setting of write permissions or saving under a different name.

Shane.

[tst]

Have you tried DataAct's version chooser? I haven't used it myself, but I believe it should do this.

[Intaris]

Yeah, that seems to be what I was talking about.

Didn't know there was already a tool for this out there.  Thanks.

I still think the "read-only" status of a file opened from a different version would be a nice addition for the LV editor though.

Shane.

[Nitin_T]

Another option is to put shortcuts to different LabVIEW versions in your 'Send To' folder (menu shortcut). It works for me (most of the time)

[Intaris]

That's a pretty good manual solution but still assumes that the user KNOWS what version the VI or Control is saved in which sometimes isn't the case.

[InfiniteNothing]

Even with the above solutions there's still a bit of trouble with installing add ons like the vision dev module. It will always install for the newest version and it's not always straight forward to copy the tool back to the previous version.

We need some sort of version chooser like in teststand where you specify what the "active" version is 

Message Edited by InfiniteNothing on 01-25-2010 11:11 AM

[TimmTheEnchanter]

The only way I could inherently see incorporating this into LabVIEW natively is to have all .vi, library, or project files associated with a completely different program (not LabVIEW).  When launched, this program would contain a simple check for which version the file was most recently saved in, and then it would automatically launch that file to its respective version of LabVIEW.

This is hairy.  It's one more thing that could just go wrong: it would need to be updated; it would cause problems if it didn't find the right version of LabVIEW on the machine; it would need error handling for corrupted VIs; and it's not clear how this new program would be associated or installed with LabVIEW (especially previous versions, which would fight for ownership of those file extensions).

While there are fairly easy ways to work around this issue, and while I can't envision any simple way of incorporating this functionality, I did give you a Kudos, because maybe someone out there will have a brighter idea of how you might implement this idea.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

There's two use cases here, and they're completely incompatible, and there's no way to have any options to rectify them.

In your case, you want the version of the VI to decide which LV to open.

In my case, I would be very frustrated if I had a LV opened and launched and I used the OS to open another VI and it launched another LV. To me, the version of LV that last saved a VI has *nothing* to do with what version I want that VI to be opened in now. You may ask, why don't you just use ctrl+o to open the VI? Frequently I've used the Windows Explorer to find the VI I'm interested in, and rather than copy/paste the path from the Explorer into LV, I just double click the VI from Explorer. [On my Mac, copying the path is nearly impossible to do, so this behavior is even more important to me.]

Each of these use cases has value. But there's really no way to support both of them.

[Intaris]

Well I could envisage this functionality working in a number of different ways.  The first which occurred to me was the seperate program to which the Explorer shortcuts were registered which would ask which version of LV (whichever are installed) to open the stuff in.  It could of course have two checkboxes with "Open with newest already running LV Version" (or possibly a drop-down box to choose the automatic target) and "Open with last used version" (Which is current behaviour) both of which could suppress the dialog compeltely.

I disagree that the two use cases are mutually exclusive.

[RavensFan]

I've recently started using Windows 7, and noticed an odd twist on this problem.

The start menu in Win 7 lists your different versions of LabVIEW.  It has an arrow that shows you the recent file list for each version of LabVIEW.  So if I go to LV13 in the Start menu, and pick a VI out of its Recent list, it seems pretty obvious that LV 13 will open with that VI.

No, because the start menu is basicaly doing the same thing as if you just went to an explorer menu and double-clicked a VI, it will open in whatever version of LV you had last opened, which happened to be LV12 in this case.

Completely unexpected to go to Start Menu >> LV13 >> MyLastLV13.vi and that have it proceed to open that in LV12.

[elset191]

Same thing applies to  right click> Open With 2012, then opening the VI in 2010.