How can I automatically generate documentation for my whole LabVIEW project?

[jareds]

Overview

This example uses recursion to harvest and publish documentation for a LabVIEW project.

Description

LabVIEW offers very good ways to document your applications.  If you want to generate comprehensive documentation for a LabVIEW project, we can tap into this documentation linked to our VIs, Classes, Controls, Indicators, etc.  This example should provide a basic outline for doing this.  It gives a good example of how to access the different items in a project.

Requirements

• LabVIEW 2012 (or compatible)

Steps to Implement or Execute Code

In order to run this example,

1. Open the project(s) you want to document and the Project Documentation.vi.
2. Run the Project Documentation.vi and it will document all the open projects.

The Project Documentation.vi gets a list of all the projects that are currently open and it loops through each one, doing the following:

• Grab the project description and a reference to My Computer.
• Using the reference to My Computer, we get a list of all the Children items to My Computer, i.e. all of the items in our project.
• Then we run a recursive VI, Recursive Documentation.vi, on each item, which prints documentation for the current item and any children it has.
• In the end it has built the documentation string based on the functionality of the Recursive Documentation.vi

Additional Information or References

Here's the VI Snippet of Project Documentation.vi:

Here's the VI Snippet of Recursive Documentation.vi: 

Notes

This example only provides a starting point for documenting a project.  It doesn't document every kind of item in a project, but the method used for the two that it does cover (VIs and Classes) can be used to extend the example to more item types, such as Variable Libraries and Build Specifications.

**This document has been updated to meet the current required format for the NI Code Exchange.**

[M_Peeker]

This looks to be what I need right now, however I'm sitting on LV8.6. Any possibilty of getting it in 8.6?

[jareds]

Sorry that I just noticed this.  I've added one that should work in 8.2 and up.

[M_Peeker]

Hi jared, and thanks.

However, it still is in version 9.0 (as the error message calls it). Could you repost?

I could very well install 2009 at home (I need to get around to that anyway) and sort myself out, so don't get out of your way on this one.

[jareds]

Sorry about that.  I saved for a previous version, but for some reason decided to edit and save the VIs in 2009 again.  I've loaded the real 8.2 VIs.

[dsavir]

Hi,

Great code! I created my own project documentation tool based on your code, I published it here.

Thanks for sharing,

Danielle

[krupa]

Its not working for me.Pls help.

[dsavir]

What exactly isn't working for you? Do your VIs have documentation (in the VI->file->properties [or ctrl+i])? If you want a linked html report, you can try my code, linked above.

[Olivier-JOURDAN]

I know that this document is old, but it's one of the first results given by search engines.

For the record, I just want to point out that the Antidoc tool can be a solution to generate automatically your code documentation.