Labview FPGA. Where should i put custom controls - or type defs in a project

[wideofthemark]

Hi,

This is maybe a silly question  - but i'm a bit confused about where within a project i should be putting customised controls (or type defs) used in FPGA vis.  If you put them within the 'FPGA module' bit of the project, then they come up as 'dependencies' - as if they are not in the project within the outer project when you read/write values to the FPGA target.  Also it seems like if you copy the project folder to another location then the FPGA vi can become broken in a way that it needs to be recompiled - even though you didn't change anything - which isn't cool if it takes an hour or so to compile.

I did have the controls in the outer project for a while - but this doesn't seem ideal from a modular programming point of view, and also it seems like it can also cause unnessary recompiling - though perhaps less often than putting them in the FPGA sub project.

Any thoughts?

[christian_w · Accepted solution]

I saw the same behaviour and its a fact that the code has to be recompiled if you move a project even if the FPGA code is unchanged. From my point of view this is a real BUG. This is independent of any source file or FPGA target.

The other point of your question is not relly clear. Of course you will get dependencies if you place the files needed outside the target project structure. But I see no problem to reference them twice because it will not double the source itself. So I suggest to reference these files multiple times in the project structure. In fact I do this because I handle a LV project file with different CRIO targets where the complete FPGA target code is double referenced under each target.

Hope it helps

Christian

[wideofthemark]

Thanks for that answer.  I agree - it seems like LV is a little abritrary with how it deals with paths - sometimes they are relative and some time absolute - eg run time menus.  Would be much nicer if it made sure that everything relative - since that is the easiest way to 'version' a project.  Having FPGA be able to distinguish between path changes and 'real' changes would be good.

As for the second bit - I guess I've got into the habit of trying to ensure that the project structure mimics the directory structure of the project - so that i can easily find a subvi to reference.