web publishing tool interferring with vi

[mysticfree]

I have a VI (LabVIEW 2009) that runs a production tester.  Today, I set up the web publishing tool so that the plant manager could see the ongoing test results from a browser at his desk.  Unfortunately, it seems that every so often, publishing the screen updates causes a sub test to take a half second longer than expected and fails an otherwise good part. 

Is that a better way to put data on our company's Intranet so that it is accessable through a web browser?  Or do I need to write another VI that has to be installed on each person's desktop to get the data? The screen resolution of the tester is 1024x768.

Thank you for your help,

Ron

[OliviaC]

Hi Ron,

Which option did you select in the web publishing tool? Redrawing the front panel will always cause a program to take a little longer to execute. You could try selecting snapshot or monitor if you don't want the managers to only view the front panel. Alternatively you can defer any front panel updates to a less critical time in your application. 

[mysticfree]

Hello Olivia,

I had experimented with all three options and had chosen 'monitor' to give the plant manager and others almost-realtime updates.   I discovered that problem having the tester publish to our network for an hour and then noticing a slight increase in failures.  As I stood in front of the tester and watched the screen, I saw where it would randomly take about a half second longer during different timing test sequences that caused that false failures.

The front panel only updates at the end of each test sub-vi.  I'd like to defer the panel updates but showing those results is important to the operator.

Maybe I should just publish one control (the summary of the production pass/fail boxes) and skip all other slick-looking info?  I was hoping to impress management with the power of LabVIEW so they would get off of their cheap butts and invest in more of NI's products.  Certainly would make my job easier.

Ron

[OliviaC]

Hi Ron,

How many things do you have updating on the front panel? and do they overlap one another? In general, I can't imagine that someone trying to access the front panel from a web browser should cause delays but I haven't tried to test this before. The front panel is published on the server and then a user would access the front panel by getting it from the server. Can you verify that the half second stalls coincide with someone trying to access the front panel?

As well, Is your application running on a desktop or a real time device?

[mysticfree]

Hello Olivia,

The application runs on a desktop.  Here is a picture of front panel:

There are 50 objects that get updated during the course of the test.

I will conduct an experiment to see if accessing the panel through the network is the cause.  I guess a quick test would be to disconnect the network connector from the tester.  I'll keep you posted.

Thanks again,

Ron

[OliviaC]

Hi Ron,

Let me know what you find out.

One thing you can try is create a separate VI that just grabs the results from your tests (for example via shared variables) and displays them on its front panel. If you use this separate VI as the VI that is published for your managers to see, any delays to the published VI will only affect the VI used for displaying the results and the original VI should continue to run without delay.

[Brian_K.]

I think the use of a tab control will reduce the amount of refresh on the VI as well as make the overall athetics look nicer 🙂  Maybe give it a go?