8.20 removed Traditiona Daq VI's in 7.1

[Dave_Thomson]

    I installed LV 8.20 a short time ago.  Tonight I opened a 7.1 application that uses Traditional Daq.  The Traditional NIDaq sub-vi pallette is gone.  Looks like the device driver install with 8.20 removed it.  This does not follow the typical backwards-compatibility pattern I've come to expect with LabVIEW.
    I reran the 8.20 device driver cd, but the section under Tradition Daq/LabVIEW wouldn't expand to show which versions of LV were supported.  I ran the device driver CD from the 7.1 installation, but it didn't seem to reinstall the LV VIs for Traditional Daq.
   Is there any way to recover from this?  Is this expected or supposed to happen?  Can it be avoided?  I need to have numerous versions of LV available on my development PC.  Crippling an old version when a new version is installed isn't acceptable.

Thanks for any help,
   Dave T.

[TiTou]

Hello,

I noticed the same issue when opening an old* soft with LV7.1.

* : well not old, but the last time I worked on it was before I install LV8

I have not much experience in working with many veriosns of LV on the same PC, but this is for sure a source of strong headheck when you want to build an app with a version wich is not the latest.
Since Daq trad is going to disappear I am not really surprised that LV 8.20 removes it...

I don't know how developpers do... In my company when developping with a LV version wich is not the lastest we completely re-install a "development PC" (Windows+"old" LV and appropriate drivers). This is the only way we found not to have drivers compatibility issues.

BTW, I wonder if there is any official paper from NI that says that there might be such issues on a PC with more than one LV version installed


 

[Tom_W_[DE]]

Hi Dave-

Actually, it is possible to have support for multiple versions of LabVIEW with the Traditional NI-DAQ 7.4.2 installation.  This section in the Traditional NI-DAQ 7.4.2 readme explains the steps necessary to add support to any and all installed LabVIEW (version 7.0 and later) versions:

---------------------------------------------------------------

LabVIEW Support

Starting with version 7.4.2, Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) will install support for the latest version of LabVIEW found on the system. If you require support for more than one version of LabVIEW, complete the following steps:

1. Install Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) 7.4.2.
2. Restart the system.
3. Copy the following folders from the latest version of LabVIEW to the folder of the older version of LabVIEW. [LVDIR] indicates the folder of the latest LabVIEW version.
   • [LVDIR]\vi.lib\daq
   • [LVDIR]\examples\daq
   • [LVDIR]\help\lvdaq.chm
   • [LVDIR]\menus\default\daq

You should now be able to use Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) with both versions of LabVIEW.

The Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) API is mass-compiled in LabVIEW 7.0. This will not affect the functionality of your VIs. However, LabVIEW will prompt you to save the Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) subVIs if your LabVIEW version is greater than 7.0. To avoid the prompts, mass-compile the folders referenced above. If you require Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy) support for earlier versions of LabVIEW, you need an earlier version of Traditional NI-DAQ (Legacy).

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Please note that you will need to copy all of the support files before saving/compiling any Traditional NI-DAQ VIs in a version of LabVIEW later than the version you will be installing support for.  The best strategy is to replicate those 4 directories to all versions of LabVIEW (7.0 and later) that are installed in your system immediately after Traditional NI-DAQ 7.4.2 is installed.

One note that is not touched on in the readme is that existing Traditional NI-DAQ VIs (i.e. those that were installed by a previous version of Traditional NI-DAQ) will be removed when Traditional NI-DAQ 7.4.2 is installed.  This allows all of the 7.4.2 VIs to be easily transferred to any version of LabVIEW while avoiding any conflicts from previous versions of VIs that might still be floating around in the system.

Please let me know if you need any additional information.  Thanks-

Tom W
NI DAQ R&D

[Dave_Thomson]

Tom,
    Thanks for the explanation and instructions.  I hope this is documented somewhere, but if it is, I certainly missed it.  Should be in big warning letters.  Also, the recovery procedure is a  bit arcane and prone to problems.  E.g., if  you use the new installation and get some of the VI's compiled into 8.20, it's going to be an arduous process to recover from.
   Anyway, I have one of my two affected computers apparently working again.

Regards,
   Dave

[Tom_W_[DE]]

Hi Dave-

Glad to hear you're in better shape now.  I agree that the possibility of accidentally compiling the VIs in a newer version of LV should be made more obvious, and I'll make sure we get a note about that possibility into the next version of the readme.

Thanks again-

[Dave_Thomson]

Tom,
   One more point:  If the installer can identify and delete the Traditional Daq vi's in older versions of LabVIEW, it would seem logical that it could also copy the new VI's into those versions as well.  I assume the old VI's were deleted because they won't work with the new driver dlls.  That would make sense.  But deleting them and not replacing them makes no sense to me.  In my opinion, anywhere the installer decides to delete that set of VI's, it should also install the new set.

Dave

[Tom_W_[DE]]

Hi Dave-

Since the user is not prompted to install to a specific LabVIEW version, there is no way to enable or disable individual versions of LabVIEW during the install process.  So, rather than presume that the user wants us to install Traditional NI-DAQ to every version in the system, we provide the VIs compiled for the earliest supported LabVIEW version (7.0) and leave it to the user to decide which LabVIEW versions to "install" them to.  Hopefully this makes the motivation a bit more clear.

Thanks-

[Dave_Thomson]

Tom,
   I appreciate your continuing to reply and explain.  Unfortunately, I still disagree with what happened, and/or I don't fully understand the motivation.
   You say that since the user can't select versions that they want Trad Daq support for, you only install the 8.20 VIs.  But you uninstall all the old ones.  I think it is pretty clear that if they had Trad Daq already installed in 7.1 and 8.0, then they would want it to remain installed, e.g. replaced.  What I find illogical is that you uninstall those without warning.  (Or at least without any warning that I noticed during installations on at least three different machines.)
   I suppose the ideal situation would be to expand the installers capabilities, so that the user can select which versions of LV support to include for Trad Daq.  If they chose not to include a version that currently had Trad Daq installed, an obvious warning would appear telling them that that support will be removed.
   Barring that, I really don't see how installing it for versions that already have Trad Daq installed is presuming too much. It is really just upgrading that component.

Regards,
   Dave

[Tom_W_[DE]]

Hi Dave-

Thank you for the explanation- I will make a note of this thread so that we can look at it for future revisions of the installer.  If you would like to document this or any other feature requests yourself I encourage you to check out the Product Suggestion Center.

Thanks again-