Enhanced State Diagram Editor

[JB]

At the moment, the most recent version of LV I'm using is 2021.

Is anyone using this toolkit with a newer version of LV? If so, which one?

Can anyone (from NI) tell me if this editor will at least be maintained to remain compatible with future (>2021) versions of LV and ideally even improved?

Thank you in advance for your contribution.

[Bob_Schor]

I would be "cautiously optimistic".  The documentation says it is mostly written in G (which means "LabVIEW"), and as it can be found on the 2024 (64-bit) version of VIPM (I didn't check 32-bit, but presume it's available there, as well), then when you install the (presumably LabVIEW 2019) version from the LabVIEW Tools Network, it will do a Mass Compile (which should bring things up to whatever version of LabVIEW you are running).

I'd say "Try it", and report back here on the Forum -- I, anyway, am curious ...

Bob Schor  

[Darren]

I just tried the Enhanced State Diagram Toolkit in LabVIEW 2025 Q1 64-bit and it worked fine with no issues. Both creating a new state diagram, and editing the existing diagrams in the shipping examples, worked as I expected.

As far as I know, at the time of this posting, NI is not currently developing any new features for this toolkit.

[JB]

Many thanks for checking that it works with LV 2025!

I very much regret that this utility is no longer maintained and that its perenity is therefore not assured. But I can easily understand the reason for this, as few programmers use it; probably also because they are unaware of its existence and how handy it is.

Another problem we're encountering is that the first generation toolkit no longer works with LV21. This prevents us from migrating our LV18 applications (we haven't used the intermediate LV versions between 18 and 21), as this would require modifying all the VIs that use this state machine. To be precise, the VIs work perfectly in the development environment, but not as executables.

[abhalla_1]

Hello - yes we have the same issue with the older version of State Diagram Editor (LV2018 to newer version).  If you are working on a newer version of LabVIEW the issue is with the Integer to Enum.

• Error 1502 can occur if you have used LabVIEW State Diagram Toolkit to construct a state machine in your program.

1. Right-click the state machine loop and select Unlock Code From Editor Wizard.
2. Find all Integer to Enum nodes and replace them with Variant To Data nodes.

Issue with the above (from my experience) is that you cannot unlock the code from the editor wizard in the later versions of LabVIEW!  The work around for that is to save it as LV2018 - open the code in 2018 and unlock it - then bring it back into later version of LabVIEW (this is a pain - but a workaround).

[Bob_Schor]

Sounds like you've found a Bug in LabVIEW.  I've asked the Forum Moderator to bring this to the attention of the LabVIEW team to (a) notify them of this problem, and (b) to notify you (by replying) if this has been fixed in a later LabVIEW version (and, if not, why not?).

Bob Schor

[JB]

These are the details I received from NI support in July.

The issue you are observing is probably related to the "integer to enum" function from the toolkit. 
This is caused by a software issue (in that toolkit) and the "integer to enum" functions must be replaced to mitigate the it.
Unfortunately it is not possible to automate this process and the following steps must be manually performed for every affected VI.
Right-Click on the state machine loop > select Unlock Code From Editor Wizard.
Find all Integer to Enum nodes and replace them either with Variant To Data or Coerce to Type.

In my case, with LV21, this state machine editor (we are talking about the old one, not the new one called Enhanced...) worked fine in the development environment but not when generating an executable.

I should mention that the new "Enhanced" editor has a few bugs (be careful when changing the order of transitions, for example) and that on several occasions I was unable to display the state machine editing window. This is very annoying in a large project using several VIs based on this toolkit, because the problem can occur in any VI and go unnoticed until the state machine of that VI needs to be edited. You then have to go back to the last version of the VI for which the editor still worked and make all the code changes, which may span several versions.

This utility is so useful, however, that I can only regret that it is not maintained and optimised by NI.