Very new to LabVIEW

[PJ_13]

I'm very new to LabView. I'm an engineer at a factory which has multiple places where LabVIEW is used on test machines however we have no one who specializes in LabVIEW and no one even has the software or knows anything about it. I've spent the last few days going through a lot of the training online and I think I have a decent low level understanding now. I'm not currently trying to write programs or anything myself. I'd like to be able to troubleshoot and possibly make a few small changes to be able to solve some of the problems we're having. 

Before asking for a license I wanted to make sure 1. I knew I could utilize it to help and 2. I knew what I needed to ask for. I have one machine that uses a LabVIEW 2015 file and another that uses a LabVIEW 2016 file. I'm working on the LabVIEW 2016 one. The PC just has LabVIEW run-time and an .exe file but I have the most recent backup with the libraries. 

I downloaded LabVIEW 2020 on my personal PC as I can't install anything on my work PC and tried to open the project. I figured out that I needed to add the given libraries to the /LabVIEW 2020/user.lib/ folder. I can get the project to open but it's a struggle. It seems it's trying to load a lot of .vi's and other things from the library but some of them it can't find at all. They don't seem to exist in the folder they gave me or the stock LabVIEW 2020 folder. I think maybe they are part of the stock LabVIEW 2016 program? It loads over 1000 items. Also I get a "Resolve Load Conflict" screen where I have two files one from the 2020 folder and that I copied in and I have to load the one I copied in. This happens probably 50+ times when trying to open the project. 

When I finally do get it to open some of the items say something like (corrupt, missing, deleted, etc) next to them. I can try to load them again but I get a lot of missing items again. Finally I got the majority of the project to load and could start looking through the diagrams. The project is much larger than I anticipated and a lot harder to follow because it uses a lot of things I haven't learned yet. Specifically I'm looking for a PID controller that controls the pressure of the system during test but I can't even find where it's at. I can find the step in the process where it should be stabilizing the pressure but it just looks as though it's reading and writing info and I can't find where anything is being controlled. 

First, I just want to get the project loaded correctly. So my questions are:

1. Is LabVIEW 2020 backwards compatible with this 2016 project? 

2. Is there a reason why I'm unable to find some of the items I'm supposed to be loading? A browse button pops up and the location of what it's looking for is shown but the item doesn't exist.

3. Is there an easier way to get through these "Resolve Load Conflicts"? I have to select the one from the backup and then hit load each time. 

[altenbach]

Can you tell us the names of some of the missing parts. Most likely they belong to drivers, modules, and add-ons that you have not installed.

Newer LabVIEW can typically open all old code but it will be in the new version after saving. To go the other direction, you would need to do a "save for previous". (details)

Feel free to ask more specific questions.

You are dealing with two separate problems:

• Learning the language (g, dataflow, etc.)
• Learning about the infrastructure of the development system.

[cbutcher]

Hi PJ,

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@PJ_13 wrote:

3. Is there an easier way to get through these "Resolve Load Conflicts"? I have to select the one from the backup and then hit load each time. 

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In general, not really (at least that comes to mind for me right now) but you can perhaps skirt the problem if you can find out what is expected, and put it in the "right" place.

As you said, there are items that you've placed in user.lib - this may solve some of these issues.

As altenbach mentioned, a (potentially large) fraction of the others may be easily(ish) installable using e.g. VIPM, NI Package Manager, the Tools Network, if you just know what you're looking for (and ideally the source, but there aren't so many common places to look through).

You might run into issues if large volumes of code were written by a predecessor, and not stored in the "most recent backup with the libraries". A list of the items that LabVIEW is looking for would probably help identify possible blocks of each of these (drivers/packages optionally installed from NI, 'user' packages from e.g. VIPM, drivers from the Tools Network, home-grown code from the author of the code you're working on).

I don't know if you've seen this or not, but if you load the project and then just click "Ignore All" (of course, everything will be broken), you'll fairly quickly (at least comparatively) be able to get the Project Explorer open, and then you can switch to the Files view (tab at the top).

This will show where the files that are missing were supposed to be (although you may want to right click on some 'high-level' folders and choose to "Expand All".

You can also right click on the Project (at the very top of the Items view) and choose Find Missing Items, which has a convenient "Export" option.

[PJ_13]

Thanks Altenbach. Yes, I have quite a few separate problems 😑 but I'm trying my best to look them up myself where I can. Currently just trying to get the project loaded correctly before I move on to my next problem as it's possible I'm just not loading what I'm looking for. 

I'm using the trial version so I didn't get all the add-ons, modules, etc. 

I won't be able to tell you the exact missing parts until I get home later. I believe one was a "global.vi" (maybe global0 or global1) it was looking for in the LabVIEW 2020 vi.lib? I only added things to the user.lib. I can take screenshots when I get home.

I did find a computer here at work that has LabVIEW 2015 installed and working but it has no internet access. When I go to the "National Instruments" folder it does have a "LabVIEW 2016" and "LabVIEW 2017" folder however only the 2015 has the LabVIEW.exe. When trying to open the 2016 project it gives an error so I'm not sure it's any use to me. 

[cbutcher]

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@PJ_13 wrote:

I'm using the trial version so I didn't get all the add-ons, modules, etc. 

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That probably won't help you, but maybe you can still make it work, or at least get a better idea...

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@PJ_13 wrote:

I won't be able to tell you the exact missing parts until I get home later. I believe one was a "global.vi" (maybe global0 or global1) it was looking for in the LabVIEW 2020 vi.lib? I only added things to the user.lib.

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I'm fairly confident that LabVIEW probably didn't ship with a VI named "global.vi" or "global0.vi" or "global1.vi" in vi.lib. Note that although the names very much suggest the opposite, installing user code to vi.lib is a fairly common (and not necessarily unreasonable) choice (rather than user.lib - they have different behaviours with various package managers and save options, apart from anything else).

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@PJ_13 wrote:

I did find a computer here at work that has LabVIEW 2015 installed and working but it has no internet access. When I go to the "National Instruments" folder it does have a "LabVIEW 2016" and "LabVIEW 2017" folder however only the 2015 has the LabVIEW.exe. When trying to open the 2016 project it gives an error so I'm not sure it's any use to me. 

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LabVIEW 201x won't be able to open any VIs that were last saved in LabVIEW 201y (y>x). You'll always get the error you're describing (or at least, an error. I suppose I'm only guessing at which error you saw!).

I'm not sure what the deal is with LabVIEW 201n folders when you don't have that version installed, but I've also seen it. I don't think it's limited to previously installed versions either - perhaps something related to shared code.

If you have a working(?) 2015 installation and your 2016 code is not too huge (and super secret) you might find some use for the Version Conversion forum (people with newer LabVIEW versions will open your new code that you upload, save it in a form compatible for the older version, then upload it back to the same thread for you).

If your code is very large/complicated/heavy with drivers/modules, this might be less practical (or break things - I don't know...)

[PJ_13]

Thanks for all the help cbutcher. Looking more into the backup I have I think I found the global.vi that I remember seeing along with a lot of the other items I was missing. I think you're correct that I just need to get them in the correct spot. 

When installing 2020 on my computer it made folders for 2017-2019 but they're basically empty except for a maybe a couple folders and like 3 files. When I first saw it I was hoping it was for backwards compatibility but was worried there wasn't a 2016 folder and actually started by creating a "LabVIEW 2016" folder and putting my user.lib backup inside that before figuring out I needed to do it in the LabVIEW 2020 folder where the .exe is.

The backup is about 500 MB so not that small. I think I'll attempt to open it again tonight now that I know a bit more. I still think I'll have the "Resolve Load Conflict" problem but I believe from what I'm reading if I get to the project folder and do "resolve conflicts" from there that it will change the dependency path for each discrepancy and when I save and open again that I won't have to do it again. 🤞

Then I can finally start on the real problems! Thanks again.

[altenbach]

Part of the problem might be the sloppiness of the previous developer to use very generic names for custom files (e.g. global.vi" for a global variable). If this is done in multiple different projects and you open a second one, you get a conflict because it will try to use the "global.vi" already in memory, which might have a completely different datatype than the "global.vi" used in the second project..

Good luck with all this. I probably would not manually copy things around  (e.g. user.lib).

[PJ_13]

Well the readme.txt in the backup specifically said to copy the zip file to the National Instruments/LabVIEW 2016 folder which didn't exist because I was using LabVIEW 2020. But I'm currently only using this on my personal PC and this is the only LabVIEW project I'm working on and it's backed up on a separate drive so worst case scenario I delete it all and reinstall LabVIEW and start from the scratch with the backup again. Unfortunately, I think it's going to take me a bit of trial and error to get things in the correct place. 

Thanks for the help. I'm sure I'll need some more once I get things working correctly.

[cbutcher]

You might face a combination of two problems here:

• The paths to user.lib, vi.lib and inst.lib are "symbolic" (not in the usual sense, but anyway...). This means if your program looks for files in user.lib, it will look in <running version>/user.lib, not necessarily 2016/user.lib.
• If the version of LabVIEW you're using is older than the saved VI versions, putting them in an older user.lib won't help. This won't affect you when opening code with 2020 (because your code must (except in special NI-internal cases) be the same version or older than 2020), but it's worth considering if you're using a few versions on other PCs.