Write to Citadel database from LabVIEW?

[josborne]

Hi. I'm a newbie when it comes to Lookout and the Citadel database... so here's my question for you all:

We have various labview applications that log data from instruments. We would like to be able to take this data and store it as "tags" in a Citadel database.

What do you think is the best way to do this?

There are ODBC drivers for the Citadel database, but they appear to only allow you to query the database to retrieve values... you can't write data to the database (so its read-only).

Are they any "Lookout VIs" or Citadel VIs that can write to the Citadel DB from LabVIEW? Or a DLL or something?

Any ideas?

regards,
John Paul

[preston_johnson]

Very nice question John Paul. I take it you already have Lookout and LabVIEW. In this case, with the latest versions of either, simply use the LabVIEW datasocket to publish the items on your front panel. Lookout then can subscribe to these once you register the LabVIEW computer. Once you have subscribed to them in Lookout, you are then able to set up logging. You may need to create an expression object to route the data to citadel.

If you just want to use LabVIEW and the Citadel database, you might try VI Logger. This works in our configuration utility - MAX, and also comes with a set of VIs for LabVIEW. One caveot, the Citadel database in VI logger is newer (and faster) than the Citadel database in Lookout. I believe NI is working to synchronize
the version in the future, and its hard to say when. So till then, you would not be able to merge data in the dislike citadel databases. However, you can always use and ODBC call set to extract from both and store in a more permanent SQL database such as access, oracle, ms back office, etc.

Good Luck,

Preston Johnson
Business Development Manager
Industrial Applications
National Instruments