How to write an About.vi

[jbrohan]

Does anyone have an example of an about.vi. It needs the NI copyright notice and also the date of compilation.

Yours Sincerely
John

[Enrique]

John;

There is a template included with LabVIEW to create an About box. The template is located in:

\Templates

At the end, an About Box is a dialog box. Any VI window can be a dialog box. In the File menu, go to "VI Properties", select the "Windows Appearance" category and select the "Dialog" option there.

To write information in the About box, just change your pointer to "Edit text" and type the information you need.

Regards;
Enrique
www.visecurity.com

[Matt_F]

There is a good shipping example that demonstrates using an "About Box" in LabVIEW. You can find it by searching the example finder for the keyword "menus" and then selecting the "Menu Selection Demo.vi".

This demo shows how we can use run time menus inside our LabVIEW VIs. The About Box will be seen under Help->About....

[jbrohan]

Thanks for your replies. I am actually looking for two other things.
Date last modified, and the Copyright statement that is required in an authorized program

Apparently " Copyright ©[yr] National Instruments Corporation. All Rights Reserved "
Is the form in the license agreement. I'm not sure what is being copyrighted and I'd like to see an example.

The date last modified is more interesting. I can use the date of the VI file or the date of the .exe if it's compiled. However the .exe date can be modified sometimes by ftp uploaders and downloaders, and I wondered if anyone had a way to get the actual compile date into an About box.

Yours Sincerely
John

[Matt_F]

Hello jbrohan,

One way to accomplish this is to use the revision history to find the last time the file was saved in LabVIEW. I have attached a small VI that shows how we can pull this information into a LabVIEW VI.

Note: You will need to change your LabVIEW options to update the revision history after every save. You can find these options under Tools->Options... and then going to Revision History.

[jbrohan]

Thanks Matt F. This is the way to do it. Now I'll have to smarten up my maintenance of revision Hisotry.