DATA AHEAD releases updates for XLR8 and SP7

[JensG69]

Hey everyone,

we are happy to announce a software update for our toolkits XLR8 and SP7 - v2018.2 resp. has been submitted to NI for upload to the LabVIEW Tools Network.

You will see the following changes:

•  Bad news first: Support for LabVIEW 2010 has been dropped for both toolkits.
• Good news: From now on you will be able to deactivate your license and transfer it to another system. But be aware there is a minor drawback to this: You have to do the activation and deactivation in a LabVIEW version 2014 or up, and you have to automatically activate through an internet connection for this new feature to work. BTW: The deactivation option is the reason why the support of LabVIEW 2010 had to be canceled. It is either deactivation OR support for LV 2010. Since this version is now 7.5 years old the decision was easy: deactivation won.
• Version numbering will from now on be (Year).(Month).(version/fix).(build), hence v2018.2

So what is new in SP7 (see also the quick reference guide😞

• Numerous customers asked for it, and now it is available: connection to a Siemens LOGO! logic module.
• We also got this request several times: is it possible to communicate to several S7-PLCs in parallel? Starting with this version it will be. All read and write VIs are now reentrant and hence work in parallel and independent of each other.
• This bug came up a few times too: A S7-400 PLC allowes variable rack and slot settings which were not covered by our toolkit . With v2018.2 you can now adjust these two values.
• Quickdrop did not work with this library since the naming inside the palette included square brackets. These brackets have been removed and quickdrop is now working smoothly with SP7.
• Finally some minor issues and bugs have been removed.

And for XLR8 you can expect the following changes and bug fixes (also see the quick reference guide😞

• There has been a big memory leak with the usage of XLR8 because quite a few .NET references were left open. I especially like to thank Daniel Rudaz for his excellent investigation on this issue. The good news for everyone: That is resolved now.
• Thanks to the feedback of p0rter2000 a probably annoying - but not very well known option of excel xlsx files will not be set in the future anymore.
• A feature request by another customer that we received by e-mail has been implemented: Insert Image now will accept a "LabVIEW image cluster" as input. Thus it is possible to e.g. add screenshots from your front panels directly without creating an image file on disc first.
• There has been a nasty bug in the function Save Workbook it would only work correctly with xlsx-files, not with the older xls-format. That is also resolved.
• The Clear Sheet call also was buggy - that also has been fixed.
• And then again some minor issues which most users never ran into.
• EDIT: v2018.3 in addition also includes these changes:
• expanded functionality for merging cells, allowing un-merging and checking if a merge request is valid
• extended color selection for cell borders with the xlsx file format
• several settings on "Insert Row.vi" resulted in .NET exception errors. Those are fixed now.

I will update this article when the updates are available - hopefully within the next week.

Thanks to all our users, keep your feedback about extension wishes AND bugs coming.

DATA AHEAD

[JensG69]

Hello,

perhaps some people already noticed it, the long awaited updates for XLR8 and SP7 are finally released and available for download. NI forced me to extend the documentation of all VIs which took some time. Thus you can now install v2018.3.0.7 of XLR8 and/or v2018.3.0.5 of SP7.

Both packages now include an extensive chm-file which describes in detail all VIs of the APIs.

Feel free to get in contact with us - especially if you want to make use of the new deactivation option, because for that you need to activate the toolkit again which most of you probably cannot do. We will happily help you with this.

DATA AHEAD