how to find errors upon booting

[dsg1]

Hi,

I took over on a project designed by another staff member who left employee with our company.  I'm trying to utilize his code on a 2nd computer.  I copied the VI to the other computer and it will not run.  I've found part of the problem is path statements that included the name of the computer.  I believe I have fixed all of those but there are still a number of things that come up upon initial boot up that say

ERROR 7: occured at Open File+.vi: Open File

how do I find where this error is coming from in the vi.

There are a # of things that it might have wrong yet

It could be calling a file that is not there on the 2nd computer.

I could of missed a path statement during my updates.

The file it is calling for might try to open a file that isn't there.

Or is it actually finding a file to not be in the base root directory and still loading it from a second location and just giving me a warning.

I'm guessing there is a quick way to do this, but I'm fairly new and would appreciate the help.

Thanks,

[mikeporter]

The first thing I would try doing a search to find all instances of the VI Open File+.vi. If the previous developer used hard coded paths then he probably didn't bother to connect up the error clusters either . The only other thing you can do is try to figure out what's happening through a combination of execution highlighting and watching what is happening in the program to identify where the errors are coming from. For example, if you for example see a dialog box open before the error occurs, you know that the attempted read happens after the dialog box routine.

The main thing is to use this as a learning experience: learning how to troubleshoot bad code, and as a lesson on why it is never justifiable to take shortcuts in qualty.

Mike...

[dsg1]

HI.... Thanks for the earlier help, I'm slowly getting through it.  A few days later and I'm down to just having one error left to find.

Upon bootup I get the following message.

Error 1 occured at Open File+.vi:open file

Possible reasons: an input parameter is invalid.

NI-488: Comman requires GPIB controller to be controller in charge.

I'm not sure what to try and fix to resolve that problem.  Is it possible that is saying that a 2nd software package such as kepserver is being looked for and not found or would there be another sort of explanation as to what that means.

Thanks,

[mikeporter]

The procedure is similar to the other problems you have been working on. Open the VI mentioned in the error message, open it's block diagram and put a conditional probe on the error cluster coming out of it. Set the probe to generate a breakpoint when an error occurs. Now minimize (do NOT close) the VI, and open and run the top level routine. When the error occurs the breakpoint will pop the File Open VI open and you can look at the inputs to see which one is causing the problem.

Mike...

[dsg1]

Thanks... the last error ended up being a link over to the date and time stamp that was used to generate the name of the file.

It appears that the different computers have their yearly display formatted differently.  The old computer used a 4 digit year and the newer ones all used the two digit format, thus the offset that grabbed the year was grabbing the 07 off the computer with 2007 displayed, and not finding a year on this other computer.  Now the only thing that should be left for me to do is to get rid of all the various trial software package registration forms.  (really wish they didn't do those messge pop ups)

Thanks again for the NI help,