Extending LabVIEW: Palettes, Menus, Examples, Templates, Help, Error Codes

[Jeff M]

Update: The LabVIEW Add-on Dev Center contains detailed guides that cover these topics in much more detail.

This attachment briefly describes a few different ways that you can plug into the LabVIEW environment. The following are the areas of LabVIEW discussed in this document: Palettes, Examples, Menus, Templates, Error Codes, Help, and Custom Probes.

[Albert.Geven]

Hi Jeff

nice document, but why is it still called may 2009 when it is edited on sept 2009?

[Jeff M]

Hi Albert, Although it is just now being posted on here, the content itself hasn't been edited since May 2009.

[TCPlomp]

Are these all the different ways that you can plug into the LabVIEW environment?

It would be really cool if NI semi-officially documented the environment callback VIs.

Ton

[chris.b]

Hey Ton,

These are definitely not all the ways you can plug into LabVIEW.  I can't promise you anything specific just yet, but we definitely want to have a "semi-official" document on more LV hooks.  I'll contact you offline and we can discuss it more.

[F._Schubert]

Please get some more of that documented. It took me half a day to get the lv_new_vi working. Since half a year I was planning to hack into lv_new (measuring the consequences). Thanks to Ton's hint I found the better (actually what I wanted) option via ...new_vi. The more these APIs are somhow documented, the more we as a community can contribute to a better IDE (and there is a need for the advanced users, and we hack it anyhow...).

Felix

[chris.b]

Hi Felix,

Thanks for your reply.  We are going to make an definitely going to make an effort to document "nondestructive" ways to plug in to LabVIEW.  Some of the options, like editing lv_new_vi, are hard to scale for more than one addon.

[F._Schubert]

About destructive: it is really easy to write a vi that is evil (like deleting random files), set it to run when opened and post it somewhere. There are two postings on the forum where lv_new was defect and the version 6 dialog showed up. Both solved (and I guess it where community members). Publishing these hooks would alow more community members be aware of this. Please also search lavag for a discussion between power-users of the pro's and con's after Darren first demonstrated the QD prototype. I personally consider this hook 'safe' as long as it is on my machine (I do not want it as a supported feature, just an unsupported but documented one).

About scalability: I do not want to make any plugins there. I want simply press Ctrl+N (no other keys!) and get a template (error handling, 4224 ConPane) instead of a blank vi. Others might include watermarks, copyright notice... Maybe a naming convention inside a lv project would add the appropiate scalability (so different vis get called for each project).

Felix

[CaoWJ]

yeah, nice and cool docment. thanks