Find a text inside a project ?

[Runawaycode]

Hi everyone,

I've become almost crazy searching an item in a project. The project was not made by me, so I have troubles finding what calls what, who is called by who.

Yes, I know there the project hyerierarchy and some other stuff.... but.... my question is:

Is there a way to search a text, a string, a word ?

The text can be inside a project, in a folder containing VIs, in C:\*.*

Inside the VI, the text may be in a string itselfs, in subVI name, in a label, a reference, a local variable, a comment, anywhere.

Is there not a way to da that, so that I will spend my time designing and not searching items ?

Many thanks.

[NIquist]

Edit > Find and Replace >>  Select the Text option and search away...

[Runawaycode]

No, sorry, it does only search for a string in the VI names (or custom types, or dlls). It does not search inside the VI, whether or not there's a string matching my search.

[Runawaycode]

It appears I was wrong. It does search strings inside comments and anything in general.

Could be yesterday I was very tired.

[Runawaycode]

No it doesn't work.

I have a project with A.vi and B.vi

Both A and B refer to gloabl variable called GlobalC.vi

If I start the text search from the menu of A, it doesn't find the text in B and viceversa.

I have a project with 200 VIs, which I have not written and I am becoming crazy.

Damned National Instruments is it so hard to led a user find a text in ALL elements of a project ??

[Runawaycode]

Is there anyone able to give me an hint ?

I have a big project with 200 VIs which I have not written and I am not amiliar with.

Is there any way to find a text in every project element ?

[NIquist]

Actually you can find text items in one VI from searching in a different VI but both VIs need to be open (in memory). You'll have to open your top-level VI so that everything is in memory.

There is also a 'Find Project Items.." option in the project explorer but unfortunately it does not seem to look inside the project VIs, it just searches for the text in the VI names.  Having the ability to easily search through entire projects would be a nice feature.  Perhaps a good candidate for the Idea Exchange?  http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/idb-p/labviewideas

[Runawaycode]

Thank you for your answer.

The problem is that the Vis are opened and closed programmatically via a reference and then an invoke FP.Run

So, when the main VI is loaded or running, only a fraction of the involved VIs of the projected is loaded in memory.

Moreover, of those 200 Vis , only 40 or 50 are actually used in the project. All the other VIs are left from previous projects or development and the former designer never cared to erase or isolate the unused VIs.

I understand Labview is smart and graphical, but the Search feature is fundamental to understand a project.

It would be a smart thing to let developers search inside a folder full with VIs or an arbitrary selection of VIs. Eg. you may want to compare different versions of the same VI inseide a folder.

[GerdW]

Hi Runaway,

open a new VI, drop all VIs from your project on the block diagram, save the VI named as "Tree.VI" to the project.

Now open the Tree.VI and search your text...

[Runawaycode]

That's a fantastic idea.

In fact I had already thought about it. but I am really busy adapting the project to new requests.

I hope it will work as well to create a super- hierarchical tree, even with parallel trees.