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Ain't Misbehavin' – Thanks to External Calls

Ain’t Misbehavin’ – Thanks to External Calls

When calling DLLs we are often more concerned about making the calls correctly, and not so much about what happens after we are done using it. However, when developing professional applications we have to be concerned about the entire process. As an example of the kind of things that can happen, I once built an application that called several proprietary DLLs. Moreover, these DLLs internally made…

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Implementing Dynamic User-Defined Events

In the previous post, we started looking at how to deal with the situation where you have reentrant VIs that need to have UDEs that are specific to particular instances of the VI. That post covers a lot of the basic theory and design issues, so if you haven’t read that post, please take a few moments to check it out as much of the following won’t make sense without that background.

Filling in the…

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#event driven programming #software architecture #ude #user-defined events

Dynamic UDEs: the Power for Reentrant Processes

If you have an application that you want to construct from multiple parallel processes, a key requirement is signalling – telling the various parts of the application that something important has happened, or is happening, in one of the other processes. When it comes to fulfilling that requirement, a valuable tool to have at hand is the User Defined Event, or UDE. In fact, over the past year this…

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#dynamic VI calls #event driven programming #modularity #software architecture #ude #user-defined events

If the socket fits, wear it…

One of this blog’s recurring themes is the importance of modularity as an expression of the age-old tactic of “divide and conquer”. What is perhaps new (or at least daunting) to some readers is the idea of spreading tasks across not just separate processes on the same computer, but across multiple networked computers. Of course if this strategy is to be successful, the key is communications and…

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#CSS #design patterns #event driven programming #HTML #JavaScript #labview #modularity #software architecture

Laying the good foundation, with TCP…

In case you are just joining the conversation, we are in the midst of a project to modify the testbed application that we have been slowly assembling over the past year. I would heartily recommend that you take some time and review the past posts.

To this point in our latest expansion project, we have created a remote control interface, embedded it in our testbed and performed some basic testing…

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#design patterns #ip #labview #parallel processing #remote access #software architecture #tcp #tcp/ip

It's a big interconnected world – and LabVIEW apps can play too

It’s a big interconnected world – and LabVIEW apps can play too

If I were asked to identify one characteristic that set modern test systems apart from their predecessors, my answer would be clear: distributed processing. In the past, test applications were often monolithic programs – but how things have changed! In the past we have talked several times about how the concept of distributed processing has radically altered our approach to system architecture.…

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#data validation #event driven programming #event handling #FGV #functional global variables #labview #modularity #parallel processing #software architecture #ude #user interaction #user-defined events

Tree-Control Menus: A Case Study in Data Management

The last time we were together, we discussed the first of two common use cases for tree controls: displaying tabular data. This time out, we are going to look at using tree controls as a sort of menu system to control an application’s GUI – their other major use case.

The Problem We’re Solving

If you look at the testbed application that we have been working on for almost a year, it’s pretty clear…

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#data management #event driven programming #tree control

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn LabVIEW

A Tree Grows in LabVIEW

This time out, I want to start exploring a user interface device that in my opinion is dramatically under-utilized. I am talking about the so-called tree control. This structure solves a number of interface challenges that might otherwise be intractable. For example, the preferred approach to displaying large amounts of data is to avoid generating large tabular blocks of data, opting instead to…

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#data management #dealing with complexity #labview #user interaction

Dropping-In on the Testbed

Last time out we started exploring one common application of so-called “drop-in” VI. The technique is based on the idea of creating VIs that are capable of performing something useful for the VI that is hosting it, but without interacting directly with that VI’s basic logic. The example we considered was manipulating the font and type size used to present textual data.

At the close of that post…

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#configuration management #drop-in code #labview #style conventions #VI Server

Drop-Ins Are Always Welcome

One of the key distinctions of web development is that the standards draw a bright line between content and presentation. While LabVIEW doesn’t (so far) have anything as powerful as the facilities that CSS provides, there are things that you can do to take steps in that direction. The basic technique is called creating a “drop-in” VI. Theses functions derive their name from the fact that they are…

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#modular design #style conventions #user interaction #VI Server

Plotting Large Datasets Without Waiting Forever

Many years ago in his landmark 1977 book, Exploratory Data Analysis, John Tukey made a comment that in his pre-PC, pre-Excel, pre-most-everything-we-think-we-need-to-do-analysis time was pretty radical, what which is today pretty common-sense:

“…there is never a good reason to not look at a plot of your data.”

Any test engineer worth his or her salt will admit that we often do our best work when…

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#DVR #inplace structure #memory management #plotting

More Than One Kind of Modularity

When learning something that you haven’t done before – like .NET – it’s not uncommon to go through a phase where you look at some of the code you wrote early on and cringe (or at least sigh deeply). The problem is that you are often not only learning a new interface or API, but you are learning how to best use that interface or API. The cause of all the cringing and sighing is that as you learn…

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#configuration management #data management #JSON #labview #modularity #software architecture #style conventions

A Brief Introduction to .NET in LabVIEW

From the earliest days of LabVIEW, National Instrument has recognized that it needed the ability to incorporate code that was developed in other programming environments. Originally this capability was realized through specialized functions called Code Interface nodes, or CINs. However as the underlying operating systems continued to develop, LabVIEW acquired the ability to leverage such things…

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#.net callbacks #callbacks #design patterns #event driven programming #event handling #ude #user interaction #user-defined events

Helping a Window to Remember

One of the most common, most basic, and most mindless, things we do with computers every day is open windows. Launching a program or opening a document is often synonymous (on a practical level at least) with opening a window. As common as this action is, we rarely give any thought to what is going on behind the scenes when we open a window – hence the wisecrack about it being a mindless…

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Creating a Reconfigurable Interface Using Undockable Windows

Something I have always enjoyed doing is creating programs or interfaces that do things you don’t expect LabVIEW to be able to do. Consequently, I thought I would take a couple posts and consider some useful and perhaps surprising interfaces.

The first one I want to look at is actually an idea I got from another LabVIEW Champion – Ben Rayner by name. Some time ago, he posted on the user forum a…

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#floating windows #labview #subpanels #ude #undocking windows #VI Server

Building a Web Backend in LabVIEW

When building a web-based application, one of the central goals is often to maximize return on investment (ROI) by creating an interface that is truly cross-platform. One of the consequences of this approach is that if you are using a LabVIEW-based program to do so-called “backend” tasks like data acquisition and hardware control, the interface to that program will likely be hidden from the user.…

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#configuration management #data management #data validation #labview #software architecture

Understanding Web I/O

A question that seems to be popping up with increased urgency is how to incorporate LabVIEW into an environment that is largely web-based. As you would expect, in a technology that is developing as fast as the web, it can be hard to keep track of where things are right now. In fact at least one major tech publisher (O’Reilly Media) is diving full throttle into electronic publishing because with…

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#http client vis #http get method #text parsing #web architecture

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