renaming vision VIs

[Intaris]

I just installed the first quarter Development suite on my PC and upon opening an "old" project (8.2.1) I got a dialog box that some Vivion VIs were not found.

Example: "IMAQ Spoke 2" or "Particle Analysis 3"

When searching manually in the vi.lib, I saw that the "old" VIs were not there.

Why does NI rename the VIs between vision packages? Doesn't this lead to incompatibilities betwee different Vision run-time engines?

Shane.

[BruceAmmons]

Whenever NI makes significant changes to an algorithm so that there could be different results for the same inputs, they change the name by adding a number.  Usually the old versions remain in the library for calling, but they are no longer in the palette.

I can't explain why your old project couldn't find them, though.

Bruce

[Intaris]

Keeping them in the library but not on the palette would be a perfectly understndable way of doing things but only have the newest version in my library.  I don't quite get it.

Shane.

[Intaris]

It has broken my application because the Connpane is different.

This sucks.

Do I need to re-install my 8.2.1 vision component?  Unusually enough both my 8.6 and 8.2 directories have not got the required VI in their vision libraries.

This is examtly why I tend to install all my LV versions in their own VM.  Version conflicts can cost days to fix and have the habit of raising their ugly head when a customer is around.  But NI doesn't allow that and I've been told I'm basically in violation of the licensing agreements.  I'm currently rather annoyed.

I have a sneaky suspicion that my 8.6.1 installation has overwritten my 8.2.1 vision components.  My 8.2.1, my 8.5.1 and my 8.6.1 all seem to heve exactly the same vision VIs present.  This is great.  I can now spend a whole day (or more) re-installing all of my LV software.

Shane.

Message Edited by Intaris on 03-03-2009 08:56 AM

[BruceAmmons]

I am pretty sure uninstalling Vision 8.6 and installing Vision 8.2 would solve the problem temporarily.  I am hoping somebody from NI will chime in on this for the long term solution.

I would continue with the VM approach and install each version of LV in a different VM.  I don't see anything that violates the license agreement in that.

Bruce

[Intaris]

Bruce,

I thought it would be OK too, but I did the stupid thing (me being all honest and above-board and all) of asking what the official NI stance was.  They told me it violates their licence if I install it more than 3 times on physical OR virtual machines.  They then went on to tell me it's quite possible to install multiple versions on one machine which has just now torpedoed my project.

Shane.

[Intaris]

Vision 8.6 uninstall and 8.2.1 install worked.

I thought (not hard enough obviously) the Vision module would not overwrite ALL versions installed on my PC.  But since the installer never asked which LV folder to install to, I should have known better really.

Still, the old VIs should be included in newer versions of the package.

Shane.

[gregstoll]

I'm sorry for the trouble this has caused you.

Bruce is right - when we update the functionality or inputs of an algorithm, we typically make a new version and increment the number at the end.  Then the old version of the VI is added to Compatibility.llb, so when LabVIEW loads a VI that uses them it will realize it's not in the right .llb anymore, search the whole vision directory and find it in Compatibility.llb.  I can't say what went wrong in this case, but this is definitely an upgrade scenario we support and test for.

Greg Stoll

Vision R&D

National Instruments

[BruceAmmons]

Shane,

Did you give it plenty of time to search for the new location of the VIs, or did you get tired of waiting and hit the "Ignore VI" button?  Perhaps if it didn't find it, you could have redirected it to the compatibility.llb (isn't hindsight wonderful??).

Bruce

[Intaris]

Well this is the first time I ever heard of "Compatibility.llb" so I didn't think of that.

I didn't interrupt the search, I started to load the program and was doing something else until I noticed the message boy telling me it couldn't find the VIs.  Having said that, even probes don't find any vision controls, so there's probably more to it than just this.  I HAVE added the path to my vision folder in my environment variables but it doesn't seem to help.

I'll be reinstalling windows sometime soon anyway, or maybe even replacing with Linux.

 Either way, re-installing Vision 8.2.1 fixed things.

Shane.