revision history summary

[mrbean]

I don't have any SCC with LabVIEW, so we're trying to determine the best way for our 3 sw developers to not step on each other's toes.  Our first idea is to be disciplined and use the Revision History of the VI we're working on to keep track of our changes.  Assuming we go down this route, there are a few pieces of information we'd like to be able to view/extract. 

1) is there a way to extract revision information from selected VIs, say, for example, into a file or view window.

2) We'd like to know the date of the latest change to any particular VI.  If the VIs are self contained, Windows Explorer can provide this information.  How is this determined, however, if all your VI's are contained within an llb?

3) What is the cheapest/best SCC that (1) integrates seemlessly with LV (2) provides the ability to check files in/out and ensures that no two users can modify the same file, (3) allows us to somehow capture what version of each file went into a particular build

[Khalid]

mrbean,

1.  Yes;  there's a VI Property that gives you the revision History (amng other things).  See attached diagram. 

2.  I personally don't recommemnd using LLBs (nor does NI).  See the following for more details: 

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=2118

3.  "Cheapest" and "best" do not always go together, IMHO.  Anyways, I personally like Perforce.  But there are others who like TortoiseSVN, etc.  Which happens to be free as well.  See these for more details:

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=2486

http://forums.lavag.org/index.php?showtopic=2047

Hope this helps,

-Khalid

[mrbean]

The LLB I'm working with happens to be the TestExec.llb - it's the operator interface for NI TestStand that I've copied over to a user directory so as to customize it.  Since the TestExec is in the form of an llb, do you know of a way to break up the llb into its individual pieces?  Also, any idea what (if anything) in  TestStand would have to change to accomodate this.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Under the tools menu is the VI Library Manager. You can use it to convert from an llb to a directory of separate VIs. You don't have to change a thing in TestStand.

[Khalid]

When you separate the LLB into individual files in a folder, you will want to name this directory "TestExec.llb" -- folder but with the TestExec-dot-llb as its name.  This way, any paths you already have to the VIs into the original LLB will not break.   

-Khalid

[mrbean]

By the way,

In the RevHistory.png, could you possible identify/describe the icons?  Since they aren't within an accessable VI, I'm not sure what all is going on there.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Look on your Application Control palette.

Personally, I find the revision history a poor method of source code control. Anyone at anytime can reset it and even if you select the properties to force a comment or a new entry even time it is saved, this too can be turned on or off by anyone. I'm not sure if it's changed in LabVIEW 8, but the revision history reports 0 for a VI built into an executable. With real source code control tools available free of charge, that's what I would recomend.