Project looses its files

[heel]

well - dont agree all the way. LV shouldn't to change the folder away from being autopopulating.

[Matthew_Kelton]

As I said, an argument can be made for the top level folder.  I suggest looking at the Idea Exchange and make the suggestion if it is not already there.  Sometimes NI employees look at ideas and determine they are bugs, sometimes not, but at least you can put it on the list of behaviors you'd like to see change.

[heel]

mathew you are right - I _do_ fully agree what you wrote. I did a little test to summarize

1. Have an LV project with an auto populated folder AutoPop. Save and close project.
2. Delete the disk-folder named AutoPop. 
3. Open the project. The LVfolder AutoPop is changed to an empty virtual folder with the name AutoPop.
4. Restore the disk-folder AutoPop. Refresh LVproject (F5). The LVfolder remains virtual and empty - it should return to being auto-populated but does not. (<--Issue1). So LV has lost information about that this folder were auto populated. But yet not quite, because..
5. Close Project - no changes - no save needed - no warnings
6. Reopen the project. The AutoPop folder is back in the project as it should be.
   I believe I had a case where reopen like this did _not_ bring the AutoPop folder back in this case, but I cannot reproduce this.

But what I think is wrong is the behaviour marked as issue1 above. This is reproducible. 

[RavensFan]

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@heel wrote:

1. I believe I had a case where reopen like this did _not_ bring the AutoPop folder back in this case, but I cannot reproduce this.

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Perhaps you saved the LVproj file at some point while you had it open and the autopopulating folder was non-existent?  So now you have it saved as an empty virtual folder that has no link the original, but lost, actual directory on the disk drive?

4.. I wouldn't say that LV lost the information about the auto-populating folder.  As later when you reopen the project (without saving any changes) it comes back.  Probably the F5 refresh is not enough action for LV to re-establish the link to the directory now that it has been restored.  That the connection between the project folder and the directory is only determined and re-established during the opening of the project.  Though I agree with you that it seems like an F5 should have reconnected them as well.

[heel]

yes there is an asymmetri. Either always reconnect the auto-populated folder when refresh _and_ reload or never. As of now it only reconnects upon reopen - not when doing a refresh.

I cannot exclude i got the project saved while there were a quirk on the file system, but this is long gone. I will keep an eye for it should it happen again.

[edjones93]

Hello heel,

Thank you for your list of steps, I followed these steps and was not able to replicate the issue. I agree in that this can be an undesirable behaviour for your application.

Since I cannot replicate the issue then I believe this may be due to your network connectivity, did you use a file monitoring utility as I suggested to you?

Best regards,

Ed

[heel]

Hello Ed,

I have not tried your suggestion about file monitor as this is not relevant to reproduce the scenario I describe. LV2015/32bit does behave the same on a local and on a network drive. So I am not sure what is the difference between our setups since you say you dont see the issue. Maybe someone else could check also. I'l double check my description then....

Did a double check with files on C drive follwing the description, and on two different PC's both Win7/64. It is 100% reproducible with LV15/32.

[edjones93]

Hello heel,

My apologies, I misread the f5 functionality, I do not believe this is currently a shortcut in LabVIEW. It is not present in the LabVIEW 2015 manual for which I have attached below:

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/371361M-01/lvhowto/keyboard_shortcuts/

If you would like this functionality to be integrated then I would suggest you write so in the Idea Exchange:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/idb-p/labviewideas

Currently I do not believe this is a functionality in LabVIEW and so when you press f5, no change appears.

I hope that this is helpful and you are successful in your application.

Best regards,

Ed

[heel]

Hi Ed,

I will consider the F5 issue as an idea, however this is an irrelevant detail as to my main issue - project does not properly regain control of the auto-populating folders. The refresh should not be necessary - normaly LV detects file changes after a few seconds without any user interaction required, and good so. But for the details about this specific problem with auto populated folders, please see the previous messages.

[edjones93 · Accepted solution]

Hi Heel,

I realise that this is not the functionality you wish, it is a good idea that this should repoll folders which were previously auto-populating. However since they become virtual folders, they do not know to re-poll the file contents as is done with auto-populating files.

The issue is that if LabVIEW cannot access the auto-populating folder then it assigns it as a virtual folder, this is expected behaviour, however LabVIEW does not poll virtual folders for details.  This is why LabVIEW does not re-detect the auto-populating folder until being re-opened when it re-assigns the folder to auto-populating. Hence I do not believe I can submit this as a CAR report as LabVIEW is behaving as is expected, it is that there is a functionality you expect/want that is not already existing.

Best regards,

Ed