Implementing Dynamic User-Defined Events

Posted on 2016-04-122016-04-12 by mlportersr

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 Blanks

The basic approach we took in designing our example consisted of first defining the program’s overall intended operation. With that theory sorted-out, we then began creating the program’s high-level structure, being sure to leave blanks or prototypes as placeholders for details that we hadn’t yet defined. At one time this sort of approach would have been considered heresy. The feeling was you hade to have everything worked out in detail before you wrote even one line of code or created even a single VI.

Clearly there are a lot of practical problems with this approach, but for one of the biggest (in terms of long-term impact on the project) is that it leads to a break-down in the walls that information hiding is trying so hard to erect. Think about it for a second, if an integral part of designing a process launcher includes figuring out the internal operation of the processes it is going to launch, it’s going to be very difficult to keep that knowledge from contaminating your launcher design. Or to put it another way, there will be a strong tendency to create code that depends on the process VIs behaving in a particular way.

You can see a better approach in the way we designed the launcher for our reentrant VI. Last time we defined a VI that (beyond the mechanics of how to launch a reentrant VI) only concerned itself with the data that the process VIs need to do their work. Based on a black-box description of what the routines were supposed to do, we able to create the logic for providing that data without worrying about what the routines were going to do with it. This is a Very Good Approach.

Getting Registered

One of the “blanks” that we left to be filled until now was a VI called DAQ Operations.lvlib:Interval Registry.vi. When we first considered this VI’s external persona we noted that, when passed an enumerated value Check and an interval, it would return a boolean flag indicating whether or not that interval already existed. However, we made no assumptions about how it might go about completing that task. Having taken, so to speak, a step inside the veil we can look at how it works.

Interval Registry - Check

This is the logic that completes the Check function, and as it turns out, there isn’t really very much to it. In fact, we see logic that implements a simple FGV. All the function in question really does is search an array of intervals to see if the one we asked about exists. Given this level of simplicity, a logical question would be, “Why bother with the subVI? The process manager has a loop, why not just use it to maintain the list of active intervals?”

This approach would handle half of the problem quit well – the half dealing with whether or not a particular interval was launched. But if you think about it, that isn’t what we really need to know. Operationally, we don’t care if a particular interval was ever launched. We want to know whether the interval is still running, and the interval’s current state is something of which the manager has no knowledge. Remember that when we defined the rules governing the high-level behavior of the acquisition subsystem, we said that when an acquisition process sees that it has no addresses left to poll it will shut itself down. How is the process manager supposed to know that happened?

Beyond this practical consideration, there is also a conceptual problem associated with storing the interval list in the process manager. You might not realize it, but all data has an associated “scope” that defines the area, or context, which owns the data. If we store the interval list in the process manager we are, conceptually, giving ownership of a piece of information that should belong to the subsystem as a whole, to one specific VI. Moreover, that one specific VI would then be required to manage all accesses to that data. Now while that functionality could certainly be implemented, it would be at the cost of additional complications in the form of additional signalling, and event handlers to respond to those messages.

By contrast, moving the array into a FGV that any VI in the subsystem can access, makes the data immediately available to the subsystem as a whole: No event handlers, no added signalling. As we get into the VI that performs the (simulated) Modbus IO Collect Data.vi, we see how the FGV’s remaining two functions work.

Keeping Time

Next, let’s look at the reentant VI (Metronome.vi) that is responsible for triggering acquisitions at a fixed interval. You will recall that the VI is passed three parameters when it is launched: The desired interval between acquisitions, the event to fire when the interval times out, and the event that will fire when the interval is shutting down. Here is the logic for initializing the VI.

Metronome - Initialization

We see that the interval value drives the Timeout node of an event loop, the shutdown event is registered, and the event that this VI will fire, is simply passed into the event loop. As you might expect, the event loop itself only has two events. Here is the Timeout event:

Metronome - Timeout

No surprises here: all the event needs to do is fire the acquisition event – which this code does with alacrity. The shutdown event (which handles both types of shutdown) is likewise uncomplicated:

Metronome - Stop Interval

It destroys the two dynamic UDEs and stops the event loop. The acquisition event is destroyed because once a shutdown is initiated, it is no longer needed. The interval stop event is destroyed because it is only fired in the acquisition VI, so by the time we get to this point in the code it has already been fired by the only other VI that needs it. The small delay between the two operations is to ensure that the acquisition VI has time to start shutting itself down.

Getting into the Publishing Business

The last code we need to look at is the reentrant VI that reads the simulated data and publishes it for use (Collect Data.vi). Again starting with the initialization logic, we see something very similar to the metronome VI:

Collect Data - Initialization

The main difference is that this VI needs to register to receive both dynamic UDEs. Although the VI will be generating the Delete Interval event it also needs to be able to respond to it because that context is the best place put the logic for deinitializing any acquisition logic that might be used. Another conceptual difference from the metronome is that this VI relates to the interval input in a way that is fundamentally different. For the metronome the interval is a number that has a specific meaning: it is the number of milliseconds between triggers. For this data collection routine however, it is simply a number that provides it way for it to identify itself. The broader point is that you need to remember to manage the expectations when different processes look at the same value and see different things.

Because this VI is going to be acquiring data, and performing other operations, its event loop is also more complex. Let’s look at the 5 events it will handle:

Timeout – This application is only generating simulated data, but in most other situations, there will need to be some sort of initialization performed, like opening DAQ references or establishing connections to one or more Modbus devices, and this event is a good place to handle such initialization. The way this logic is written, it is easy to make the initialization run just once, but still have it readily available if it ever needs to be run again.

Collect Data - Timeout

However, there is other initialization that needs to be performed even for simulated data. Specifically, if the initialization logic completes with no errors, we need to tell the rest of the application that this process is open and ready for business. To record that state change, we use our “repository” VI again, but this time running the Insert logic…

Interval Registry - Insert

…which is the very soul of simplicity.

Start Addresses – This event’s purpose is to maintain the process’ internal list of addresses in response to the user starting additional addresses. In completing this work, there are two cases that it will need to address.

Collect Data - Start Addresses - Adding

First there is the case where the interval number matches the value that the process is using to identify itself. In that situation the code needs to add the new addresses to the existing list, or more correctly, it needs to add addresses to the array that don’t already exist in the array. This logic protects the logic from what would be a very common operator mistake: adding addresses tht already exist. The second situation is one where the interval number does not match the value that the process is using to identify itself.

Collect Data - Start Addresses - Delete Case

In this case, we need to enforce the rule that only one process can be polling a given address. Hence, the logic needs to remove from its array any addresses any addresses contained in the new event. Of course this operation raises the spectre of the entire polling array being emptied out, with the contingent requirement that the interval shut itself down. The logic handles that scenario with a two-step process. First it tells the rest of the application that its stopping by calling the registry VI using the delete logic.

Interval Registry - Delete

After removing itself from the registry, the VI fires the Stop Interval UDE to close both itself and its associated metronome process.

Stop Addresses – This event has logic that is similar to the previous event’s delete logic, but is simpler because the only thing that matters is whether the indicated address is in the process’ address list.

Collect Data - Stop Addresses

Get Data – This event generates an array of simulated data and passes it to the static Publish Data UDE, along with an array of addresses associated with the data values. In addition for troubleshooting purposes, the code also writes the data to a front panel table.

Collect Data - Get Data

Stop Interval; Stop Application – Finally, this event stops this VI if either the interval or the application as a whole is shutting down.

Collect Data - Stop Interval

As the comment says, if the acquisition logic needs to be deinitialized, this in the place to put that logic. But why is the code interested in the front panel’s state? Although this VI usually runs in the background unseen, there are times that you want to be able to view its front panel so you can verify its operation. In this example, I implemented that functionality using the VI properties to force the front panel open when it starts running. This logic checks to see if the front panel is open and, if so, closes it.

Testing the Code

So with all the code implemented, here are the Subversion links to the application an the toolbox of reusable code:

Dynamic Registration – Release 1
Toolbox – Release 18

The first thing I would recommend after downloading the code, it to go through it while re-reading both this post and the previous one. Often times it is easier to understand things when looking at the code, that are otherwise a bit obscure when all you have are pictures of the code.

Next run the top-level VI (Dynamic Registration.vi). When the front panel opens, click on the Add Addresses button to define some addresses. For the purpose of this example, I created a simple dialog box that lets you specify a starting address, the number of consecutive addresses to collect, and the sample interval. The starting address needs to be between 40000 and 49999, the number of consecutive address must be less than 1000 and the sample interval needs to be between 300 and 5000 (milliseconds). These parameter limits are set in the dialog box code – feel free to change them as you desire. Likewise, the output of this dialog box is a list of addresses, so you can also change the selection interface if you so desire.

To get started, define 5 addresses starting at 40000 with a sample interval of 1000-msec. You should see the front panel of acquisition VI pop open showing the 5 addresses being updated once per second. In addition, the main GUI should show data from the same 5 addresses.

Click the Add Addresses button again, but this time define 5 addresses starting at 40008, and updating every 2000-msec. A second acquisition VI windows will open showing the 5 new addresses, and the main GUI will show a total of 10 addresses with the results changing at different rates.

Let’s next see what happens if you specify addresses that are already being polled. Click the Add Addresses button one more time and define 5 addresses starting at 40004, and updating every 3000-msec. This action defines a range where 40004 is already being polled once a second and 40008 is being polled every 2 seconds. In response you will see a third acquisition window open, but you will observe that one address is removed from each of the two existing polling lists, and that the main GUI shows a total of 13 addresses being polled.

Finally, to test the auto-shutdown operation click the Delete Addresses button and in the resulting dialog box, tell the system to delete 5 addresses starting at 40008. Because the 2000-msec interval is emptied out, the acquisition VI window associated with that interval will close. Finally, the polling list for the 3000-msec interval will be reduced by one.

The Big Tease

So that’s about all for now on this topic, but what’s in store for next time? One of the things that I like to talk about in this venue are things that can cause unexpected complications, so next time I’m going to discuss what happens when a DLL misbehaves as you are trying to close it.

Until Next Time…
Mike…

Dynamic UDEs: the Power for Reentrant Processes

Posted on 2016-03-222016-03-23 by mlportersr

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 blog has considered a variety of ways to use this tool. However, all these implementations have one thing in common: They all use static UDEs. In other words, the event that will be used to signal a particular occurrence is decided when the code is created and it never changes.

But what if you don’t know until runtime what event you want to use? For example, it is common with reentrant code that you won’t have a fixed set of UDEs because there isn’t a fixed set of VIs that are running. Sometimes you need to be able to send a message to one particular clone. In such a situation, you aren’t just sending general signals, but signals that are unique to a particular instance of a VI. The solution is to use UDEs that are dynamically generated in the same way that the reentrant VIs are.

To demonstrate this technique, the next couple posts will highlight this use case, starting this time with a discussion of some of the design considerations. Our into to this exploration is an application that I was once assigned to maintain.

The Problem Defined

The job asked me to expand an existing application that had been developed by a large LabVIEW consulting firms located here in the US. The problem is that the software wasn’t designed for expandibility. Specifically, a key part of the program was a subsystem that polled a user-defined list of Modbus registers at a rate that was also user-defined. Because the user-defined inputs could change at any time, the decision was made to make the acquisition loops event-driven, and create a separate “metronome” process that would fire an acquisition event at the user defined rate. So far, so good. The real issue is with the implementation of this concept.

Apparently, there was originally only going to be one timed interval but, as you might expect, a requirement was later added to create a second one. To meet this scope change, with as little effort as possible, the decision was made to simply duplicate all the VIs used for the first process while appending “2” to the end of the names – an expedient that is unfortunately common in code developed by “large LabVIEW consulting firms”. To make matters worse, the modularization was poor so the program was basically built around a huge cluster containing literally dozens of references for UDEs, notifiers and queues that ran through nearly every VI in the application.

In the end, the only way to implement the required functionality was to completely redesign and reimplement that portion of the code. The really ironic part is that it took me less time to implement the functionality correctly, than it did to do it poorly the first time. Using this description as a jumping-off point, I obviously won’t be discussing the solution that I implemented for the original application. What we will do is use it as “inspiration” for examining techniques that could cover a wide range of similar requirements.

Getting Moving in the Right Direction

First, we should recognize that while our earlier conversation incorporates a pretty good description of what the code basically needs to do, we do need to flesh it out a bit: At run time, we need to be able to create multiple independently-timed data reads with varying intervals between reads. In addition, the results from these timed acquisitions need to be “published” somehow so they can be used by the rest of the program.

With this broader functional definition in place, we can begin to consider the appropriate API for accessing that functionality. As I have said many times before, one of the corner stones of a good API is the concept of information hiding – the process of deciding what information to expose to the calling code, and what information to keep private. So like a politician running for reelection, our next job is to decide what to hide and where to hide it.

The basic principle in play is to hide any information that the calling code either doesn’t need to know, or which would be counter-productive for it to know. If we think about it, there are exactly three pieces of information that the calling VI actually needs to know in order to define and use an acquisition task:

The Modbus address to read
The interval between reads
How to receive the published data

On the other hand however, there is a (much) large list of things that the calling code doesn’t need to know, among which are things like:

How the Modbus is read
How the timers work
The signalling that the timers use
How many acquisition processes there are
How the timing is implemented
Internal data structures
etc…

Now that we have a handle on what we want to expose – and just as importantly, what we do not want seen – we can start designing the outward interface.

The Outside View

The obvious place to start is with the VI that will configure or setup the polling. Given that we have already decided that we only want to expose two parameters (addresses to read, and the read interval) we can go ahead and create a placeholder VI that provides the appropriate IO, but which is for now empty.

Start Addresses

Note that with the exception of the error cluster, this VI has no other outputs. Remember that all this VI is doing is identifying a group of addresses that some hidden “something” is going to read at the specified interval. Consequently, the only response that this VI can give is whether or not the specification process was successful. The assumption is that other parts of the software will independently report errors that occur during the data reads. In the same way, we are also going to need a VI to tell the “something” that is doing the reading that we are no longer wishing to poll particular addresses.

Stop Addresses

The interface to this VI is even more basic than the one for starting the polling of addresses, and the reason is simple. At this point we don’t care what rate at which a given address is being polled, we just want it to stop. You could argue that knowing the polling interval would make it easier for the code to find the addresses to delete, while that is true, it would also mean that the calling code would have to keep track of the addresses that it is monitoring – which could quickly become an awful lot of redundant information for the caller to remember and manage.

Last but not least, the third interface VI that we need to specify is the data publication mechanism. To keep things simple, we should use a technique that is easy to implement. So I am picking the logical equivalent of the callback techniques apparent in other languages: a User Define Event. For this application, the event will return an array of address/value pairs that the calling application can use as it desires. Note that in this implementation, all the acquisition processes will be sending their data to the same place, so this can be a static UDE.

The Test Application

Finally, while we’re talking about interfaces, let’s also look at the calling application. Because all the “heavy lifting” will be encapsulated in subVIs, the calling code can be very simple. It has buttons for identifying addresses that we wish to poll, addresses we want to stop polling, and stopping the application. To display the results, the application’s front panel incorporates a table that shows the addresses in ascending order, and the last data value acquired for that address.

Main GUI

The block diagram is, likewise, pretty plain. It is event-driven with one event for each of the three buttons on the front panel, plus one to handle the UDE that publishes the data. You can check out its code in the source later.

Crawling Under the Covers

With the front end interfaces thus defined, we now can start thinking about code that will make the interfaces do something useful. The simple part is the UDE for publishing the results because it uses the same technique that we have used many times over the past year. To summarize the implementation, a library named for the event (Publish Data.lvlib) has four subVIs: One (structured as a FGV) for creating/buffering a reference to the event, and one each for registering to receive the event, generating the event, and destroying the event. In addition, it incorporates a typedef that defines the event data.

Publish Data Event Library

The process for managing the addresses to read requires a bit more thought. To begin with, we know that there are only two address management operations: adding and removing addresses. However, we also know that if we are to conform to our API, we need to hide those explicit operations from the calling application. This situation is one of those development scenarios where the words that we use to talk about what we are doing can help or hinder our understanding of what we are trying to accomplish. To see what I mean, let’s consider a similar case that is part of LabVIEW itself: the logic for handling queues.

You may have noticed that with the built-in API you don’t “create” or “destroy” queues. Rather, you “acquire” and “release” references to the queue. While you may wonder what difference this wording makes, we need to remind ourselves that it isn’t simply a matter of an API developer running amuck with a thesaurus. It actually describes a very real and very important distinction. Instead of creating a queue, you are simply telling LabVIEW that you want to acquire a reference to a queue. Now, when you make this request, there are two possible situations:

The queue doesn’t currently exist and LabVIEW needs to create one.
The queue already exists so all you need is to get a reference to the one that is there.

Likewise, you don’t destroy a queue when you are done using it, you simply tell LabVIEW that you have no further need for it by releasing the reference you previously acquired. Because LabVIEW keeps track of how many open references are associated with each queue, LabVIEW can tell when the queue is no longer in use and destroy it automatically. Now consider for a moment the degree to which this hidden functionality simplifies your code. You no longer need to worry about what or who is using the queue, and when it is safe to destroy it. All that potentially complex logic is hidden in the way that the functionality is encapsulated, and the difference in terminology highlights that difference.

As we are designing our API, we need to adhere to the same idea. So instead of “adding” and “removing” address, let’s think about this problem in terms of “starting” and “stopping” acquisition from lists of addresses. To grasp the benefits that we can garner from this change in language, lets consider what actually needs to happen behind the scenes for each of these operations. Just to be clear, this complexity has nothing to do with how we choose to implement the functionality, it is inherent in what we are trying to do. This logic will have to be created regardless of how we structure the code.

Starting Acquisition: This might seem to be pretty easy, but what if users start acquiring data from an address at one rate, but then later changes their mind (or makes a mistake) and starts the same address at a different rate. There is no point to have the same address being read at two different rates. Likewise, it is not clear that this action should be considered an error. Therefore, to do what the user is requesting you first have to remove that address from the process that is currently polling it, and then reassign it to a different (perhaps new, perhaps preexisting) acquisition process. Taking the point further, what if the address you remove from a process is the only address that it is currently polling. Removing that address would leave that acquisition loop with nothing to do, and so we need some way to stop it.

Stopping Acquisition: For its part, stopping the acquisition of addresses can hide some complexity of its own. For example, say the user identifies a list of 4 addresses to be stopped. There is no guarantee that all the addresses are being polled by the same acquisition process – and even if they are all together, we don’t know which process is reading them. This fact implies a need to be able to search all the acquisition processes for a particular address. Plus, as before if we remove all the addresses associated with a particular interval we need to stop that acquisition task.

Remember, this functionality will always be needed, it is simply more robust (and therefore smarter) to hide it from the calling application by encapsulating it in our API.

Getting Down With the Acquisition

To this point we have described the acquisition processes as having two loops: One performs the acquisition and one is a “metronome” function that periodically fires an event that causes the acquisition loop to acquire one scan of all the channels contained in its current configuration. In addition, both of these processes need to be reentrant so multiple copies of each can be launched as needed. Now we need to refine that basic description be specifying the rules that will govern their operation.

First, let’s state that each process is self maintaining both in terms of its own operation and its data. What that requirement means is that each instance of the acquisition process will maintain for itself a list of the addresses that it is polling. Consequently, when a process receives a system message (via UDE) to stop polling on one or more addresses, it will examine its own list of addresses and remove any that are in the “stop polling” list.

Second, we will state that there will only one acquisition process running for each acquisition interval. Hence, if a process receives a system message specifying its own polling interval, it will add those addresses to the list of addresses it is already polling. For example, say there is a process running that is acquiring data from 4 addresses every 1000 msec and it receives a system message that the user wants to start an additional 5 addresses at that same sample interval. The code will add those 5 new addresses to the 4 that it is already polling.

Third, if an acquisition process receives a system start message that does not specify its polling interval, it will prevent duplicate polling by automatically search its configuration for the addresses in the message and delete any that it finds.

Fourth, if after stopping one or more addresses a process finds that its polling list is empty, it will shut itself down by firing an event that is unique to that particular instance.

Fifth, in the event that the user starts addresses for an interval that is not currently running, the logic incorporates a manager function that will start-up a new acquisition process to handle that interval.

Let’s Build Some Code

Finally we are ready to start writing some code to materialize what has to this point been mostly words. A good place to start this work is with the manager VI that will launch new acquisition processes for us. I like this approach because it will give us the opportunity look at how the pieces fit together.

How the Pieces Fit Together

The operational rules we listed earlier provide a number of clues as to where we are going next. To begin with, we talked a lot about messages. This information by itself is enough to let us design and implement the inner workings of the two interface routines we prototyped earlier. They are simply the event generation VIs of two more static UDEs (Start Addresses and Stop Addresses) – and we already know how to build those.

Next, because we have defined what the manager basically needs to do we can create an event-driven shell for it that can respond to two events: Stop Application and Start Addresses. Again, if you have been reading this blog for a while, the Stop Application event is an “old friend” so we will concentrate on the manager’s response to the Start Addresses event. Since this response will vary depending upon whether or not the specified interval already exists, we need to design a way for the code to make that determination, while continuing to bear in mind the principles of information hiding, to wit, the manager doesn’t need to know how the determination was made, just what the result was.

Start Addresses Event Handler

To support this functionality, we will create a VI (called Interval Registry.vi) that the acquisition processes will maintain as they start and stop. This function will support three operations: Check, Insert and Delete. For the Check operation we see here, the routine checks to see if there is already a process running at the indicated sample interval. If there isn’t, the VI returns a false Boolean value that causes the manager to call a launcher VI (Process Launcher.vi) that kicks off all the VIs needed to service the interval. If, however, the interval is already running there is nothing more for the manager to do, so the true case (not shown) does nothing.

Turning our attention now to the VI that launches the new process VIs, we have built this sort of launcher several times before, so we already know its basic structure. What we need clarity on is the details of the data that needs to be passed to the two VIs.

Starting with the simpler of the two (which we will call Metronome.vi) it’s only purpose is to fire an acquisition event at some predefined interval. However, if it is going to stop when it has nothing more to do, it also needs to know what event will tell it to stop. Note that both of these events are specific to each interval that is created. Consequently, they both need to be created on the fly when the acquisition process is launched with their references passed into the new clone as a parameters.

In the same way, looking at the acquisition VI (we’ll call it Modbus Reader.vi) we see that it is going to be receiving the acquisition event that the metronome fires and is also going to need to shut down like the metronome, so it will need to get references to the same to events. The only other messages it will need to receive are the static ones that we have discussed earlier, but because they are static we don’t have to be concerned with them here.

So we add in the event definition logic, and this is what our finished launcher VI looks like:

Process Launcher

The Big Tease

The next thing we need to look into is the VIs that are being launched and the logic that resides inside Interval Registry.vi, but this post is getting long so that will have to wait until next time.

Until Next Time…
Mike…

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

Posted on 2015-11-032015-11-02 by mlportersr

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. In fact, the internal design of our Testbed Application is a very concrete expression of that architectural shift. However, the move away from monolithic programs has had a profound impact in another area as well.

In the days of yore, code you wrote rarely had to interact with outside software. The basic rule was that if you wanted your program to do something you had to implement the functionality yourself. You had to assume this burden because there was no alternative. There were no reusable libraries of software components that you could leverage, and almost no way to pass data from one program to another. About all you could hope for were some OS functions that would allow you to do things like read and write disk files, or draw on the screen. In this blog we have looked at ways that our LabVIEW applications can use outside resources through standardized interfaces like .NET or ActiveX. But what if someone else wants to write a program that uses our LabVIEW code as a drop in component? How does that work?

As it turns out, the developers saw this possibility coming and have provides mechanisms that allow LabVIEW application to provide the same sort of standardized interface that we see other applications present. Over the next few posts, we are going to look at how to use incorporate basic remote interfaces ranging from traditional TCP/IP-based networking to building modern .NET assemblies.

What Can We Access?

However, before we can dig into all of that, we need to think about what these interfaces are going to access. In our case, because we have an existing application that we will be retrofitting to incorporate this functionality, we will be looking at the testbed to identify some basic “touchpoints” that a remote application might want to access. By contrast, if you are creating a new application, the process of identifying and defining these touchpoints should be an integral part of you design methodology from day one.

The following sections present the areas where we will be implementing remote access in our testbed application. Each section will describe the remote interface we desire to add and discuss some of the possible implementations for the interface’s “server” side.

Export Data from Plugins

The obvious place to start is by looking at ways of exporting the data. This is, after all, why most remote applications are going to want to access our application: They want the data that we are gathering. So the first thing to consider is, where does the data reside right now? If you go back and look at the original code, you will see that, in all cases, the primary data display for a plugin is a chart that is plotting one new point at a time. Here is what the logic looked like in the Acquire Sine Data.vi plugin.

As you can see, the only place the simulated data goes after it is “acquired” is the chart. Likewise, if you looked at the code for saving the data, you would see that it was getting the data by reading the chart’s History property.

Now, we could expand on that technique to implement the new export functionality, but there is one big consequence to that decision. Approaching the problem in this way would have the side-effect of tying together the number of data points that are saved to the chart’s configuration. Hence, because the amount of data that a chart buffers can’t be changed at runtime, you would have to modify the LabVIEW code to change the amount of data that is returned to the calling application.

A better solution is to leverage what we have learned recently about DVRs and in-place structures to create a storage location the size of which we can control without modifying the application code. A side-effect of this approach is that we will be able to leverage it to improve the efficiency of the local storage of plugin data – yes, sometimes side-effects are good.

To implement this logic we will need three storage buffers: One for each of the two “acquisition” plugins and one for the reentrant “temperature controller” plugin. The interface to each storage buffer will consist of three VIs, the first one of which is responsible for initializing the buffer:

This screenshot represents the version of the initialization routine that serves the Ramp Signal acquisition process. The basic structure of this code is to create a circular buffer that will save the last N samples – where “N” is a reconfigurable number stored in the database. To support this functionality, the DVR incorporates two values: The array of datapoints and a counter that operates as a pointer to track where the current insertion point is in the buffer. These VIs will be installed in the initialization state of the associated plugin screen’s state machine. With the buffer initialized, we next need to be able to insert data. This is typical code for performing that operation:

Because the DVR data array is initialized with the proper number of elements at startup, all this logic has to do is replace an existing value in the array with a newly acquired datapoint value, using the counter of course to tell it which element to replace. Although we have a value in the DVR called Counter we can’t use it without a little tweaking. Specifically, the DVR’s counter value increments without limit each time a value is inserted, however, there is only a finite number of elements in the data array. What we need for our circular buffer is a counter that starts at 0, counts to N-1 and then returns to 0 and starts over. The code in the image shows the easiest way to generate this counter. Simply take the limitless count and modulo divide it by the number of points in the buffer. The output of the modulo division operation is a quotient and a remainder. The remainder is the counter we need.

Modulo division is also important to the routine for reading the data from the buffer, but in this case we need both values. The quotient output is used to identify when the buffer is still in the process of being filled with the initial N datapoints:

During this initial period, when the quotient is 0, the code uses the remainder to trim off the portion of the buffer contents that are yet to be filled with live data. However, once the buffer is filled, the counter ceases being the a marker identifying the end of the data, and it becomes a demarcation point between the new data and the old data. Therefore, once the quotient increments past 0, a little different processing is required.

Once the circular buffer is full, the element that the remainder is pointing at is the oldest data in the array (chronologically speaking), while the datapoint one element up from it is newest. Hence, while the remainder is still used to split the data array, the point now is to swap the two subarrays to put the data in correct chronological order.

Retrieve Graph Images from Plugins

The next opportunity for remote access is to fetch not the data itself, but a graph of the data as it is shown on the application’s GUI. This functionality could form the basic for a remote user interface, or perhaps as an input to a minimalistic web presentation. Simplifying this operation is a control method that allows you to generate an image of the graph and the various objects surrounding it like the plot legend or cursor display. Consequently, the VI that will be servicing the remote connections only needs to be able to access the chart control reference for each plugin. To make those references available, the code now incorporates a buffer that is structurally very similar to the one that we use to store the VI references that allow the GUI to insert the plugins into its subpanel. Due to its similarity to existing code, I won’t cover it in detail, but here are a few key points:

Encapsulated in a library to establish a namespace and provided access control
The FGV that actually stores the references is scoped as Private
Access to the functionality is mediated though publicly-scoped VIs

This FGV is the only new code we will need to add to the existing code.

Adding Remote Control

One thing that both of the remote hooks we just discussed have in common is that they are both pretty passive – or to make this point another way, they both are monitoring what the application is doing without changing what it is doing. Now we want to look at some remote hooks that will allow remote applications control the application’s operation, at least in a limited way.

Since the way the application works is largely dependent upon the contents of the database, it should surprise no one that these control functions will need to provide provisions for the remote application to alter the database contents in a safe and controlled way.

Some Things to Consider

The really important words in that last sentence are “safe” and “controlled”. You see, the thing is that as long as you are simply letting people read the data you are generating, your potential risk is often limited to the value of the data that you are exposing. However, when you give remote users or other applications the ability to control your system, the potential exists that you could lose everything. Please understand that I take no joy in this conversation – I still remember working professionally on a computer that didn’t even have a password. However, in a world where “cyber-crime”, “cyber-terrorism” and “cyber-warfare” have become household terms, this conversation is unavoidable.

To begin with, as a disclaimer you should note that I will not be presenting anything close to a complete security solution, just the part of it that involves test applications directly. The advice I will be providing assumes that you, or someone within your organization, has already done the basic work of securing your network and the computers on that network.

So when it comes to securing applications that you write, the basic principle in play here is that you never give direct access to anything. You always qualify, error-check and validate all inputs coming from remote users or applications. True, you should be doing this input validation anyway, but the fact of the matter is that most developers don’t put a lot of time into validating inputs coming from local users. So here are a couple of recommendations:

Parametrize by Selecting Values – This idea is an expansion on a basic concept I use when creating any sort of interface. I have often said that anything you can do to take the keyboard out of your users’ hands is a good thing. By replacing data that has to be typed with data menus from which they can select you make software more robust and reduce errors. When working with remote interfaces, you do have to support typed strings because unless the remote application was written in LabVIEW, typing is the only option. But what you can do is limit the inputs to a list of specific values. On the LabVIEW-side the code can convert those string values into either a valid enumeration, or a predefined error that cancels the operation and leaves your system unaltered. When dealing with numbers, be sure to validate them also by applying common-sense limits to the inputs.

Create Well-Defined APIs – You want to define a set of interfaces that specify exactly what each operation does, and with as few side-effects as possible. In fancy computer-science terms, this means that operations should be atomic functions that either succeed or fail as a unit. No half-way states allowed! Needless to say, a huge part of being “well-defined” is that the APIs are well-documented. When someone calls a remote function, they should know exactly what is expected of them and exactly what they will get in response.

Keep it Simple – Let’s be honest, the “Swiss Army Knife” approach to interface design can be enticing. You only have to design one interface where everything is parametrized and you’re done, or at least you seem to be for a while. The problem is that as requirements change and expand you have to be constantly adding to that one routine and sooner or later (typically sooner) you will run into something that doesn’t quite fit well into the structure that you created. When that happens, people often try to take the “easy” path and modify their one interface to allow it to handle this new special case – after all, “…it’s just one special case…”. However once you start down that road, special cases tend to multiply like rabbits and the next thing you know, your interface is a complicated, insecure mess. The approach that is truly simple is to create an interface that implements separate calls or functions for each logical piece of information.

With those guidelines in mind, let’s look at the three parameters that we are going to be allowing remote users or applications to access. I picked these parameters because each shows a slightly different use case.

Set the Acquisition Sample Interval

One of the basic ways that you can store a set of parameters is using a DVR, and I demonstrated this technique by using it to store the sample rates that the “acquisition” loops use to pace their operation. In the original code, the parameter was already designed to be changed during operation. You will recall that the basic idea for the parameter’s storage was that of a drop box. It wasn’t important that the logic using the data know exactly when the parameter was changed, as long as it got the correct value the next time it tried to use the data. Consequently, we already have a VI that writes to the DVR (called Sample Rate.lvlib:Write.vi) and, as it turns out, it is all we will need moving forward.

Set Number of Samples to Save

This parameter is interesting because it’s a parameter that didn’t even exist until we started adding the logic for exporting the plugin data. This fact makes it a good illustration of the principle that one change can easily lead to requirements that spawn yet other changes. In this case, creating resizable data buffers leads to the need to be able change the size of those buffers.

To this point, the libraries that we have defined to encapsulate these buffers each incorporate three VIs: one to initialize the buffer, one to insert a new datapoint into it, and one to read all the data stored in the buffer. A logical extension of this pattern would be the addition of a fourth VI, this time one to resize the existing buffer. Called Reset Buffer Size.vi these routines are responsible for both resizing the buffer, and correctly positioning the existing data in the new buffer space. So the first thing the code does is borrow the logic from the buffer reading code to put the dataset in the proper order with the oldest samples at the top and the newest samples at the bottom.

Next the code compares the new and old buffer sizes in order to determine whether the buffer is growing larger, shrinking smaller or staying the same size. Note that the mechanism for performing this “comparison” is to subtract the two value. While a math function might seem to be a curious comparison operator, this technique makes it easy to identify the three conditions that we need to detect. For example, if the values are the same the difference will be 0, and the code can use that value to bypass further operations. Likewise, if the two numbers are not equal, the sign of the result will indicate which input is larger, and the absolute magnitude of the result tells us how much difference there is between the two.

This is the code that is selected when the result of the subtraction is a positive number representing the number of element that are to be added to the buffer.

The code uses the difference value to create an array of appropriate size and then appends it to the bottom of the existing array. In addition, the logic has to set the Counter value point to the first element of the newly appended values so the next insert will go in the correct place. By contrast, if the buffer is shrinking in size, we need to operate on the top of the array.

Because the buffer is getting smaller, the difference is a negative number representing the number of elements to be removed from the buffer data. Hence, the first thing we need to do is extract the number’s absolute value and use it to split the array, effectively removing the elements above the split point. As before, we also need to set the Counter value, but the logic is a little more involved.

You will remember that the most recent data is on the bottom of the array, so where does the next data point need to go? That’s right, the buffer has to wrap around and insert the next datapoint at element 0 again, but here is where the extra complexity comes in. If we simply set Counter to 0 the data insert logic won’t work correctly. Reviewing the insert logic you will notice that the first pass through the buffer (modulo quotient = 0) is handled differently. What we need is to reinitialize Counter with a number that when subjected to the modulo division will result in a remainder of 0, and a quotient that is not 0. An easily derived value that meets that criteria is the size of the array itself.

Finally we have to decide what to do when the buffer size isn’t changing, and here is that code. Based on our discussions just now, you should be able to understand it.

Set Temperature Controller Operating Limits

Finally, there are two reasons I wanted to look at this operation: First, it is an example of where you can have several related parameters that logically form a single value. In this case, we have 5 separate numbers that, together, define the operation of one of the “temperature controller” processes. You need to be on the look-out for this sort of situation because, while treating this information as 5 distinct value would not be essentially wrong, that treatment would result in you needing to generate a lot of redundant code.

However, this parameter illustrates a larger issue, namely that changes in requirements can make design decisions you made earlier – let’s say – problematic. As it was originally designed, the temperature controller values were loaded when the plugins initialized, and they were never intended to be changed during while the plugin was running. However, our new requirement to provide remote control functionality means that this parameter now needs to be dynamic. When confronted with such a situation, you need to look for a solution that will require the least rework of existing code and the fewest side-effects. So you could:

Redesign the plugin so it can restart itself: This might sound inviting at first because the reloading of the operating limits would occur “automatically” when the plugin restarted. Unfortunately, it also means that you would have to add a whole new piece of functionality: the ability for the application to stop and then restart a plugin. Moreover, you would be creating a situation where, from the standpoint of a local operator, some part of the system would be restarting itself at odd intervals for no apparent reason. Not a good idea.
Redesign the plugin to update the limits on the fly: This idea is a bit better, but because the limits are currently being carried through the state machine in a cluster that resides in a shift-register, to implement this idea we will need to interrupt the state machine to make the change. Imposing such an interruption risks disrupting the state machine’s timing.

The best solution (as in all such cases) is to address the fundamental cause: the setups only load when the plugin starts and so are carried in the typedef cluster. The first step is to remove the 5 numbers associated with the temperature controller operating parameters from the cluster. Because the cluster is a typedef, this change conveniently doesn’t modify the plugin itself, though it does alter a couple of subVIs – which even more conveniently show up as being broken. All that is needed to repairs these VIs is to go through them one by one and modify the code to read the now-missing cluster data values with the corresponding values that the buffered configuration VI reads from the database. Said configuration VI (Load Machine Configuration.vi) also requires one very small tweak:

Previously, the only time logic would force a reload of the data was when the VI had not been called before. This modification adds an input to allow the calling code to request a reload by setting the new Reload? input to true. To prevent this change from impacting the places where the VI is already being called, the default value for this input is false, the input is tied to a here-to-fore unused terminal on the connector pane, and the terminal is marked as an Optional input.

Building Out the Infrastructure

At this point in the process, all the modifications that need to be done to the plugins themselves have been accomplished, so now we need is a place for the external interface functionality itself to live. One of the basic concepts of good software design is to look at functionality from the standpoint of what you don’t know or what is likely to change in the future, and then put those things into abstracted modules by themselves. In this way, you can isolate the application as a whole, and thus protect it from changes that occur in the modularized functionality.

The way this concepts applies to the current question should be obvious: There is no way that we can in the here and now develop a compete list of the remote access functionality that users will require in the future. The whole question is at its essence, open-ended. Regardless if how much time you spend studying the issue, users have an inherently different view of your application than you do and so they will come up with needs that you can’t imagine. Hence, while today we might be able to shoe-horn the various data access and control functions into different places in the current structure, to do so would be to start down a dead-end road because it is unlikely that those modifications would meet the requirements of tomorrow. What we need here is a separate process that will allow us to expand or alter the suite of data access and control functionality we will offer.

Introducing the Remote Access Engine

The name of our new process is Remote Access.vi and (like most of the code in the project) it is designed utilizing an event-drive structure that ensures it is quiescent unless it is being actively accessed. The process’ basic theory of operation is that when one of its events fire, it performs the requested operation and then sends a reply in the form of a notification. The name of the notification used for the reply is sent as part of the event data. This basic process is not very different from the concept of “callbacks” used in languages such as JavaScript.

Although this process is primarily intended to run unseen in the background, I have added three indicators to its front panel as aides in troubleshooting. These indicators show the name of the last event that it received, the name of the plugin that the event was targeting, and the name of the response notifier.

The Read Graph Data Event

The description of this event handler will be longer than the others because it pretty much sets the pattern that we will see repeated for each of the other events. It starts by calling a subVI (Validate Plugin Name.vi) that tests to see if the Graph Name coming from the event data is a valid plugin name, and if so, returns the appropriate enumeration.

The heart of this routine is the built-in Scan from String function. However, due to the way the scan operation operates, there are edge conditions where it might not always perform as expected when used by itself. Let’s say I have a typedef enumeration named Things I Spend Too Much Time Obsessing Over.ctl with the values My House, My Car, My Cell Phone, and My House Boat, in that order. Now as I attempt to scan these values from strings, I notice a couple of “issues”. First there is the problems of false positives. As you would expect, it correctly converts the string “My House Boat” into the enumerated value My House Boat. However, it would also convert the string “My House Boat on the Grand Canal” to the same enumeration and pass the last part of the string (” on the Grand Canal”) out its remaining string output. Please note that this behavior is not a bug. In fact, in many situations it can be a very useful behavior – it’s just not the behavior that we want right now because we are only interested in exact matches. To trap this situation, the code marks the name as invalid if the remaining string output is not empty.

The other issue you can have is what I call the default output problem. The scan function is designed such that if the input string is not scanned successfully, it outputs the value present at the default value input. Again, this operation can be a good thing, but it is not the behavior that we want. To deal with this difference, the code tests the error cluster output (which generates and error code 85 for a failed scan) and marks the name as invalid if there is an error.

When Validate Plugin Name.vi finishes executing, we have a converted plugin name and a flag that tells us whether or not we can trust it. So the first thing we do is test that flag to see whether to continue processing the event or return an error message to the caller. Here is the code that executes when the result of the name validation process is Name Not Valid.

If the Response Notifier value from the event data is not null, the code uses it to send the error message, “Update Failed”. Note that this same message is sent whenever any problem arises in the remote interface. While this convention certainly results in a non-specific error message, it also ensures that the error message doesn’t give away any hints to “bad guys” trying to break in. If the Response Notifier value is null (as it will be for local requests) the code does nothing – remember we are also wanting to leverage this logic locally.

If the result of the name validation process is Name Valid, the code now considers the Plugin Name enumeration and predicates its further actions based on what it finds there. This example for Sine Source shows the basic logic.

The code reads the data buffer associated with the signal and passes the result into a case structure that does one of two different things depending on whether the event was fired locally, or resulted from a remote request. For a remote request (Response Notifier is not null), the code turns the data into a variant and uses it as the data for the response notifier. However, if the request is local…

…it sends the same data to the VI that saves a local copy of the data.

The Read Graph Image Event

As I promised above, this event shares much of the basic structure as the one we just considered. In fact, the processing for a Name Not Valid validation result is identical. The Name Valid case, however, is a bit simpler:

The reason for this simplification is that regardless of the plugin being accessed, the datatypes involved in the operation are always the same. The code always starts with a graph control reference (which I get from the lookup buffer) and always generates an Image Data cluster. If the event was fired locally, the image data is passed to a VI (Write PNG File.vi) that prompts the user for a file name and then saves it locally. However, if instead of saving a file, you are wanting to pass the image in a form that is usable in a non-LabVIEW environment, a bit more work is required. To encapsulate that added logic, I created the subVI Send Image Data.vi.

The idea is to convert the proprietary image data coming from the invoke node into a generic form by rendering it as a standard format image. Once in that form, it is a simple matter to send it as a binary stream. To implement this approach, the code first saves the image to a temporary png file. It then reads back the binary contents of the file and uses it as the data for the response notifier. Finally, it deletes the (now redundant) temporary file.

The Set Acquisition Rate Event

This event is the first one to control the operation of the application. It also has no need to be leveraged locally, so no dual operation depending on the contents of the Response Notifier value.

Moreover, because the event action is a command and not a request, the response can only have one of two values: “Update Failed” or “Update Good”. The success message is only be sent if the plugin name is either Sine Source or Ramp Source, and no errors occurs during the update. While on the topic of errors, there are two operations that need to be performed for a complete update: the code must modify both the database and the buffer holding the live copy of the setting that the rest of the application uses. In setting the order of these two operations, I considered which of the two is most likely to generate an error and put it first. When you consider that most of the places storing live data are incapable of generating an error, the database update clearly should go first.

So after verifying the plugin name, the subVI responsible for updating the database (Set Default Sample Period.vi) looks to see if the value is changing. If the “new” value and the “old” value are equal, the code returns a Boolean false to its Changed? output and sets the Result output to Update Good. It might seem strange to return a value to the remote application that the update succeeded when there was no update performed, but think about it from the standpoint of the remote user. If I want a sample period of 1000ms, an output of Update Good tells me I got what I wanted – I don’t care that it didn’t have to change to get there. If the value is changing…

…the code validates the input by sending it to a subVI that compares it to some set limits (500 < period < 2500). Right now these limits are hardcoded, and in some cases that might be perfectly fine. You will encounter many situations where the limits are fixed by the physics of a process or a required input to some piece of equipment. Still, you might want these limits to be programmable too, but I’ll leave that modification as, “…as exercise for the reader.” In any case, if the data is valid, the code uses it to update the database and sets the subVI’s two outputs to reflect whether the database update generated an error. If the data is not valid, it returns the standard error message stating so.

The Set Data Buffer Depth Event

The basic dataflow for this event is very much like the previous one.

The primary logical difference between the two is that all plugins support this parameter. The logic simply has to select the correct buffer to resize.

The Set TC Parameters Event

With our third and (for now at least) final control event, we return to one that is only valid for some of the plugins – this time the temperature controllers.

The interesting part of this event processing is that, because its data was not originally intended to be reloaded at runtime, the live copy of the data is read and buffered in the object-oriented configuration VIs.

Consequently, the routine to update the database (Save Machine Configuration.vi) first creates a Config Data object and then use that object to read the current configuration data. If the data has changed, and is valid, the same object is passed on to the method that writes the data to the database. Note also, that the validation criteria is more complex.

In addition to simple limits on the sample interval, the Error High Level cannot exceed 100, the Error Low Level cannot go below 30, and all the levels have to be correct relative to each other.

Testing

With the last of the basic interface code written and in place, we need to look at how to test it. To aide in that effort, I created five test VIs – one for each event. The point of these VIs is to simply exercise the associated event so we can observe and validate the code’s response. For instance, here’s the one for reading the graph data:

It incorporates two separate execution paths because it has two things that it has to be doing in parallel: Sending the event (the top path) and waiting for a response (the bottom path). Driving both paths, is the output from a support VI from the notifier library (not_Generic Named Notifier.lvlib:Generate Notifier Name.vi). It’s job is to generate a unique notifier name based on the current time and a 4-digit random number. Once the upper path has fired the event, it’s work is done. The bottom path displays the raw notifier response and graphs of the data that is transferred. Next, the test VI for reading the graph image sports similar logic, but the processing of the response data is more complex.

Here, the response notifier name is also used to form the name for a temporary png file that the code uses to store the image data from the event response. As soon as the file is written, the code reads it back in as a png image and passes it to a subVI that writes it to a 2D picture control on the VI’s front panel. Finally, the three test VIs for the control operations are so similar, I’ll only show one of them.

This exemplar is for resizing the data buffers. The only response processing is that it displays the raw variant response data.

To use these VIs, launch the testbed application and run these test VIs manually one at a time. For the VIs that set operating parameters, observe that entering invalid data generates the standard error message. Likewise, when you enter a valid setting look for the correct response in both the program’s behavior and the data stored in the database. For the VI’s testing the read functions, run them and observe that the data they display matches what the selected plugin shows on the application’s GUI.

Testbed Application – Release 18
Toolbox – Release 15

The Big Tease

In this post, we have successfully implemented a remote access/control capability. However, we don’t as of yet have any way of accessing that capability from outside LabVIEW. Next time, we start correcting that matter by creating a TCP/IP interface into the logic we just created. After that introduction, there will be posts covering .NET, ActiveX and maybe even WebSockets – we’ll see how it goes.

Until Next Time…
Mike…

A Brief Introduction to .NET in LabVIEW

Posted on 2015-07-022015-10-06 by mlportersr

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 as DLLs, ActiveX controls and .NET assemblies. Unfortunately, while .NET solves many of the problems that earlier efforts to standardize sharable code exhibited, far too many LabVIEW developers feel intimidated by what they see as unmanageable complexity. The truth, however, is that there are many well-written .NET assemblies that are no more difficult to use than VI Server.

As an example of how to use .NET, we’ll look at an assembly that comes with all current versions of Windows. Called NotifyIcon, it is the mechanism that Windows itself uses to give you access to programs through the part of the taskbar called the System Tray. However, beyond that usage, it is also an interesting example of how to utilize .NET to implement an innovative interface for background tasks.

The Basic Points

Given that the whole point of this lesson is to learn about creating a System Tray interface for your application, a good place to start the discussion is with a basic understanding of how the bits will fit together. To begin with, it is not uncommon, though technically untrue, to hear someone say that their program was, “…running in the system tray…”. Actually, your program will continue to run in the same execution space, with or without this modification. All this .NET assembly does is provide a different way for your users to interact with the program.

But that explanation raises another question: If the .NET code allows me to create the same sort of menu-driven interface that I see other applications using, how do the users’ selections get communicated back to the application that is associated with the menu?

The answer to that question is another reason I wanted to discuss this technique. As we have talked about before, as soon as you have more than one process running, you encounter the need to communicate between process – often to tell another process that something just happened. In the LabVIEW world we often do this sort of signalling using UDEs. In the broader Windows environment, there is a similar technique that is used in much the same way. This technique is termed a callback and can seem a bit mysterious at first, so we’ll dig into it, as well.

Creating the Constructor

In the introduction to this post, I likened .NET to VI Server. My point was that while they are in many ways very different, the programming interface for each is exactly the same. You have a reference, and associated with that reference you have properties that describe the referenced object, and methods that tell the object to do something.

To get started, go to the .NET menu under the Connectivity function menu, and select Constructor Node. When you put the resulting node on a block diagram, a second dialog box will open that allows you to browse to the constructor that you want to create. The pop-up at the top of the dialog box has one entry for each .NET assembly installed on your computer – and there will be a bunch. You locate constructors in this list by name, and the name of the constructor we are interested in is System.Windows.Forms. On your computer there may be more than one assembly with this basic name installed. Pick the one with the highest version (the number in parentheses after the name).

In the Objects portion of the dialog you will now see a list of the objects contained in the assembly. Double click on the plus sign next to System.Windows.Forms and scroll down the list until you find the bullet item NotifyIcon, and select it. In the Constructors section of the dialog you will now see a list of constructors that are available for the selected object. In this case, the default selection (NotifyIcon()) is the one we want so just click the OK button. The resulting constructor node will look like this:

But you may be wondering how you are supposed to know what to select. That is actually pretty easy. You see, Microsoft offers an abundance of example code showing how to use the assemblies, and while they don’t show examples in LabVIEW, they do offer examples in 2 or 3 other languages and – this is the important point – the object, property and method names are the same regardless of language so it’s a simple matter to look at the example code and, even without knowing the language, figure out what needs to be called, and in what order. Moreover, LabVIEW property and invoke nodes will list all the properties and methods associated with each type of object. As an example of the properties associated with the NotifyIcon object, here is a standard LabVIEW property node showing four properties that we will need to set for even a minimal instance of this interface. I will explain the first three, hopefully you should be able to figure out what the fourth one does on your own.

Starting at the top is the Text property. It’s function is to provide the tray icon with a label that will appear like a tip-strip when the user’s mouse overs over the icon. To this we can simply wire a string. You’ll understand the meaning of the label in a moment.

Giving the Interface an Icon

Now that we have created our NotifyIcon interface object and given it a label, we need to give it an icon that it can display in the system tray. In our previous screenshot, we see that the NotifyIcon object also has a property called Icon. This property allows you to assign an icon to the interface we are creating. However, if you look at the node’s context help you see that its datatype is not a path name or even a name, but rather an object reference.

But don’t despair, we just created one object and we can create another. Drop down another empty .NET constructor but this time go looking for System.Drawing.Icon and once you find the listing of possible constructors, pick the one named Icon(String fileName). Here is the node we get…

…complete with a terminal to which I have wired a path that I have converted to a string. In case you missed what we just did, consider that one of the major failings of older techniques such as making direct function calls to DLLs was how to handle complex datatypes. The old way of handling it was through the use of a C or C++ struct, but to make this method work you ended up needing to know way too much about how the function worked internally. In addition, for the LabVIEW developer, it was difficult to impossible to build these structures in LabVIEW. By contrast, the .NET methodology utilizes object-oriented techniques to encapsulate complex datatypes into simple-to-manipulate objects that accept standard data inputs and hide all the messy details.

Creating a Context Menu

With a label that will provide the users a reminder of what the interface is for, and an icon to visually identify the interface, we now turn to the real heart of the interface: the menu itself. As with the icon, assigning a menu structure consists of writing a reference to a property that describes the object to be associated with that property. In this case, however, the name of the property is ContextMenu, and the object for which we need to create a constructor is System.Windows.Forms.ContextMenu and the name of the constructor is ContextMenu(MenuItem[] menuItems).

From this syntax we see that in order to initialize our new constructor we will need to create an array of menuItems. You got to admit, this makes sense: our interface needs a menu, and the menu is constructed from an array of menu items. So now we look at how to create the individual menu items that we want on the menu. Here is a complete diagram of the menu I am creating – clearly inspired by a youth spent watching way too many old movies (nyuk, nyuk, nyuk).

Sorry for the small image, but if you click on the image, you can zoom in on it. As you examine this diagram notice that while there is a single type of menuItem object, there are two different constructors used. The most common one has a single Text initialization value. The NotifyIcon uses that value as the string that will be displayed in the menu. This constructor is used to initialize menu items that do not have any children, or submenus. The other menuItem constructor is used to create a menu item that has other items under it. Consequently in addition to a Text initialization value, it also has an input that is – wait for it – an array of other menu items. I don’t know if there is a limit to how deeply a menu can be nested, but if that is a concern you need to be rethinking your interface.

In addition to the initialization values that are defined when the item is created, a menuItem object has a number of other properties that you can set as needed. For instance, they can be enabled and disabled, checked, highlighted and split into multiple columns (to name but a few). A property that I apply, but the utility which might not be readily apparent, is Name. Because it doesn’t appear anywhere in the interface, programmers are pretty much free to use is as they see fit, so I going to use it as the label to identify each selection programmatically. Which, by the way, is the next thing we need to look at.

Closing the Event Loop

If we stopped with the code at this point, we would have an interface with a perfectly functional menu system, but which would serve absolutely no useful purpose. To correct that situation we have to “close the loop” by providing a way for the LabVIEW-based code to react in a useful way to the selections that the user makes via the .NET assembly. The first part of that work we have already completed by establishing a naming convention for the menu items. This convention largely guarantees menu items will have a unique name by defining each menu item name as a colon-delimited list of the menu item names in the menu structure above it. For example, “Larry” and “Moe” are top-level menu items so their names are the same as their text values. “Shep” however is in a submenu to the menu item “The Other Stooge” so its name is “The Other Stooge:Shep”.

The other thing we need in order to handle menu selections is to define the callback operations. To simplify this part of the process, I like to create a single callback process that services all the menu selections by converting them into a single LabVIEW event that I can handle as part of the VI’s normal processing. Here is the code that creates the callback for our test application:

The way a callback works is that the callback node incorporates three terminals. The top terminal accepts an object reference. After you wire it up, the terminal changes into a pop-up menu listing all the callback events that the attached item supports. The one we are interested in is the Click event. The second terminal is a reference for the VI that LabVIEW will have executed when the event you selected is fired. However, you can’t wire just any VI reference here. For it to be callable from within the .NET environment it has to have a particular set of inputs and a particular connector pane. To help you create a VI with the proper connections, you can right-click on the terminal and select Create Callback VI from the menu. The third terminal on the callback registration node is labelled User Parameters and it provides the way to pass static application-specific data into the callback event.

There are two important points here: First, as I stated before, the User Parameters data is static. This means that whatever value is passed to the terminal when the callback is registered is from then on essentially treated as a constant. Second, whatever you wire to this terminal modifies the data inputs to the callback VI so if you are going to use this terminal to pass in data, you need to wire it up before you create the callback VI.

In terms of our specific example, I have an array of the menu items that the main VI will need to handle so I auto-index through this array creating a callback event for each one. In all cases, though, the User Parameter input is populated with a reference to a UDE that I created, so the callbacks can all use the same callback VI. This is what the callback VI looks like on the inside:

The Control Ref input (like User Parameter) is a static input so it contains the reference to the menu item that was passed to the registration node when the callback was created. This reference allows me to read the Name property of the menu item that triggered the callback, and then use that value to fire the SysTray Callback UDE. It’s important to remember when creating a callback VI to not include too much functionality. If fact, this is about as much code as I would ever put in one. The problem is that this code is nearly impossible to debug because it does not actually execute in the LabVIEW environment. The best solution is to get the selection into the LabVIEW environment as quickly as possible and deal with any complexity there. Finally, here is how I handle the UDE in the main VI:

Here you can see another reason why I created the menu item names as I did. Separating the different levels in the menu structure by colons allows to code to easily parse the selection, and simultaneously organizes the logic.

Future Enhancements

With the explanations done, we can now try running the VI – which disappears as soon as you start it. However, if you look in the system tray, you’ll see its icon. As you make selections from its menu you will see factoids appear about the various Stooges. But this program is just the barest of implementations and there is still a lot you can do. For example, you can open a notification balloon to notify the user of something important, or manipulate the menu properties to show checkmarks on selected items or disable selections to which you want block access.

The most important changes you should make, however, are architectural. For demonstration purposes the implementation I have presented here is rather bare-bones. While the resulting code is good at helping you visualize the relationships between the various objects, it’s not the kind of code you would want to ship to a customer. Rather, you want code that simplifies operation, improves reusability and promotes maintainability.

Stooge Identifier — Release 1

The Big Tease

So you have the basics of a neat interface, and a basic technique for exploring .NET functionality in general. But what is in store for next time? Well I’m not going to leave you hanging. Specifically, we are going to take a hard look at menu building to see how to best modularize that functionality. Although this might seem a simple task, it’s not as straight-forward as it first seems. As with many things in life, there are solutions that sound good – and there are those that are good.

Until Next Time…

Mike…

Creating a Reconfigurable Interface Using Undockable Windows

Posted on 2015-06-152015-06-15 by mlportersr

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 small proof-of-concept VI for an interface that is so cool I though I’d polish it up, flesh it out and see what came out of it.

What it does

At first glance, the interface appears similar to the test bed application that we have built on this blog. There is a common display area and by making selections from a pop up menu, you can display screens showing different data.

The difference is that if you click a button, the GUI will “undock” the current screen and turn it into an independent floating window that is no longer accessible from the popup menu.

The software allows an operator to undock as many screen as they want at one time. The only limitations are screen space and logic that mandates leaving at least one screen docked. Likewise, if you close one of the floating windows, it will again take up its original position in the selection menu. As is our usual policy, a link to the code is a little further along in this post.

Why This Interface?

I fully plan to get into how the code works, but first we need to consider why you would want to use this interface in the first place. What is the use case that this interface addresses?

Hopefully it should be obvious to anyone who considers the matter for more than a moment or two that user interfaces are always compromises. If you do your due diligence when designing an interface you try to put together in one screen or window the various bits of information that are logically related, or at least will be used together. However, requirements can change, or a particular type of user might need to be able to correlate pieces of data that are on different screens.

You could create a separate screen for just that user, but that solution requires some additional development effort. However, if you create windows that can be undocked to be moved around the screen as desired, users that want to see their data in a particular way may be able to do so without waiting for you to create a custom screen.

So with all that in mind, let’s think about how we might accomplish this sort of GUI.

How it Works in Theory…

The first thing to you need to realize as we begin looking at how to create this interface, is that if you have been following this blog you already know everything required to make this happen. The only thing missing is an understanding of how to make all the pieces fit together in a slightly different way.

For example, we have talked many times about how to create a basic multiscreen interface using subpanels. Likewise, we know how to make windows float on top of one another by defining their behavior as floating. Now if you think about it, these are the two states that our screens can be in: as a subpanel (when docked) and as a floating window (when undocked).

So our problem is really as simple as deciding how to manage the transition from one state to the other. If you are following the recommendations I have been making, the screens are already written as separate processes that don’t know (or care) how they are being displayed – or even if they are being displayed.

So how do we want this to behave? Well for the undocking there are a variety of options. LabVIEW supports drag-and-drop so we might be able to do something with that. Alternatively, we could create a pull down menu with an “Undock Current Window” on it, or even a custom shortcut menu when the user right-clicks on the on the interface’s front panel. But those are really just different ways of triggering the same logic, so for this demo I’m just going to create a button below the subpanel that is labeled something obscure like, “Click to Undock the Current Display”.

For docking one of the floating windows back in the interface, our options are more limited. But when you have a really good technique available, you only need one. How about this: when you click the window’s close button it gets docked back into the interface. After all, it’s what most users would try anyway.

…and in Practice

Now that we basically understand where we are going, lets start looking at some code.

Undockable Windows – Release 1
Toolbox – Release 9

The block diagram of the top-level VI is pretty much what a regular reader of this blog would expect. It starts by running a subVI that loads into memory, and starts executing, all the VIs that are going to be available through the subpanel. References to these VIs are stored in a DVR so they can be used later to populate the subpanel itself. This subVI also outputs an array of strings that are the names of the VIs it loaded. The code uses this array to initialize the strings in a ring control, and then programmatically fires the value change event associated with the ring.

With this work done, the VI next registers to receive a UDE that we will discuss in a moment, and enters the program’s main event loop. This loop includes a value change event for the ring control that changes the VI that is visible in the subpanel, and two additional events that manage the undocking and docking processes.

Getting Undocked

The first of these new events handles the undocking of windows and, understandably, is a value change event on the undocking button. The event logic goes about its work in two steps that are contained in separate subVIs. The first one is called Float the VI.vi.

Its job is to remove the VI that is being undocked from the subpanel using the Remove VI subpanel control method, and then (after looking up its VI reference in the DVR) open its front panel using the FP:Open VI method. The other half of the operation is performed in Process Undock.vi.

This VI’s purpose is to update the user interface to the VI’s change of state – which in this case means simply disabling its selection in the ring control, and updating the DVR. This subVI is also responsible for getting a reference to the next available docked window and inserting it into the subpanel. As a by-product of this operation, the subVI also generates a flag that indicates when there is only one docked window remaining. The event handler uses this flag to disable the undock button when all but one of the displays have been undocked.

Docking a Window

Like the previous one, this event handles its duties as a two-step process. But unlike the previous one, it is driven by a UDE from the VI that is being docked back into the main display. As stated before, this action should be triggered when the user closes the VI’s front panel. The plugins accomplish this task by intercepting the Panel Close? event and instead of closing its front panel, simply fires a UDE (Redock Screen) that tells the GUI to reincorporate it back into the subpanel. The first subVI in the event handler is Unfloat the VI.vi.

After looking up the VI’s reference in the DVR, it closes the VI’s front panel and inserts it back into the subpanel. Note that it is not necessary to remove the VI that is already there. The other subVI that the event handler calls is Process Redock.vi.

Basically reversing the operation that were performed when the window was undocked, this VI removes the window’s name in the ring control from the list of disabled items and updates the status stored in the DVR.

The Big Tease

So there’s a basic implementation of a pretty neat capability, but what now? What sort of enhancements might we reasonably want to make? I have an idea. You notice that when the window’s undock, they always open in the middle of the main screen. This is certainly a reasonable approach, but an enhancement that would be sure to make your users happy is to provide some sort of mechanism whereby each window would remember its last position. With that capability in place a windows would reopen in the same place as it was when it was last closed.

So when we next get together, let’s do that. It will be a good thing to know how to do in general.

Until Next Time…

Mike…

Using VI Server to Interact with Executables

Posted on 2015-05-252015-05-25 by mlportersr

We all want to be able to reuse code and a good way of accomplishing that goal is by repurposing executables that you wrote for other projects. The problem is how you control them. Last week we started addressing this challenge by looking at some of the general tools that are at our disposal for manipulating executables — regardless of where you got them. This time out we will complete the discussion by looking at some of the things you can do that are specific to LabVIEW-created executables.

First, we need an executable

As the title says, if we are going to talk about making VI Server calls to an executable, the first thing we need is an executable — and an executable, we have. Although the functionality it implements is, to be honest, rather sparse, it is sufficient to demonstrate what we need. Here’s what its front panel looks like:

Starting in the top left, it sports an indicator where you can see the command line that was used to launch it. Immediately below that string is an indicator showing the current time, a button for stopping the program manually, and a pair of LEDs that indicate when two different events are triggered: Application Instance Close? and Panel Close?.

To the right is a path indicator that displays one of two different paths depending on the state of the checkbox that is next to it. Below the path indicator are two numerics. One is the PID of the instance that is running. The other is the TCP/IP port number that was assigned to the executable when it was launched. Note that if you don’t provide a port number in the command line parameters, the executable will terminate almost immediately — though you may see it briefly appear in the Windows Task Manager.

Handling the front panel

Most of the code that makes this interface work is pretty straight forward, so I won’t take the time to describe it. The one exception is this bit in the initialization logic:

The reason that I’m pulling it aside for special attention is that it illustrates (at least part of) the solution for a problem that you will encounter the first time you create a VI that is designed to run entirely in the background. The heart of this problem is mismatched expectation: When LabVIEW runs an executable it expects to open the window associates with the top-level VI. You, on the other hand, wanting the executable is run unseen in the background, expect the window to stay closed. Consequently, what happens is that LabVIEW opens the window and starts the VI running in that order and your code immediately hides the front panel. What the user sees is a windows that open and then immediately closes without explanation, and if there is one things that worries users more than things happening too slowly, its things happening too fast — like windows flashing open and then closing.

The solution lies in a VI property called Transparency. The setting to control it can be found in the custom appearance dialog.

When the box is checked and the percentage is set to 100, the window will be open but totally transparent. Hence, when the runtime engine launches the application, the window will still open but it will be invisible. A moment later, the code above will hide the window and set the transparency to 0 so that when we do decide to open it, we will be able to see it.

VI Server Operations

Last time, I presented this block of settings from the application’s INI file. Before we continue, we need to take a moment all consider what these settings mean — at least to the extent that anyone knows what they mean…

server.tcp.enabled=True
; server.tcp.port=3363
; server.tcp.serviceName=""
server.tcp.acl="290000000A000000010000001D00000003000000010000002A10000000030000000000010000000000"
server.vi.access="+*"
server.vi.callsEnabled=True
server.app.propertiesEnabled=True
server.vi.propertiesEnabled=True
server.control.propertiesEnabled=True

The first four parameters in this list control overall access to the application via TCP/IP. Consequently, they are the four that you are most likely need to muck with:

server.tcp.enabled=True: This setting enables the TCP/IP interface that VI Server uses. If this setting is False, nothing is happening.
; server.tcp.port=3363: This setting specifies the port that the associated TCP/IP listener will be monitoring for a connection. Note that I have this line commented out because we will be assigning this value via command line parameter.
; server.tcp.serviceName="": Also commented out, this optional parameter allows you to define a name that you can then use to reference the application, instead of a Port number.
server.tcp.acl=???: This setting defines the TCP/IP access control list (ACL) — or who is allowed to connect to the application. Already I can hear you wondering, what is the deal with that long string? Well, if you ever find out be sure and let me know. The bottom line is that the original interface included an ACL that simply listed the IP addresses that were and were not allowed to access the application. For reasons unknown, NI decided to change this common sense approach to something more enigmatic. So how do you generate this string? Glad you asked. According to LabVIEW’s documentation, you need to set up your development environment to have the same access list as you want your application to have, and then copy and paste the resulting string from LabVIEW’s INI file to your application’s INI file, seriously…

The remaining parameters specify in one way or another the specific resources that the remote program can access in the target application.

server.vi.access="+*": This parameter contains a list of VIs that are accessible through the VI Server interface. The default value shown allows access to all VIs.
server.vi.callsEnabled=True: This parameter specifies whether the remote program is allowed to run VIs contained in the executable. We leave this True so I can demonstrate that ability.
server.app.propertiesEnabled=True: This parameter gives the remote program access to the executable’s application-class properties — like the names of all the VIs currently in memory.
server.vi.propertiesEnabled=True: This parameter gives the remote program access to the VI-class properties of individual VIs. This category include things like a reference to the VI’s front panel.
server.control.propertiesEnabled=True: This parameter gives the remote program access to the properties associated with individual controls on VI front panels. For example, you need to have this parameter enabled to do things like programatically set the value of a control. This value is True as I will be demonstrating this ability as well.

Finally, I want to state one thing that I hope is obvious. All these “security” settings are contained in a plain text file that can be edited by anyone who knows how to use a simple text editor. The point here is that while recent versions of Windows are making it harder and harder to modify files in the “Programs” directories, it is not by any stretch of the imagination bullet-proof. Hence, if there are truly sensitive things that need restricted access, don’t depend on these settings.

What we can do with these controls

So let’s put some of what we have been learning about into action. If you download the code from the SVN repository you will find, in addition to the source code, a compiled executable. For the following tests, you can either run the executable I have included, or compile it on your own — it’s up to you. You will also want to be sure to update your copy of the toolbox as I have added a couple useful VIs. One of the executable management VIs is where we will start:

Launching the Executable

Start by opening small test executable.lvproj and then open the routine Launch 3x.vi. It’s job is to launch three copies of the test application (small test executable.exe) so on the front panel click the path browser button next to the path control and navigate to and then select the test application. Now, run the VI.

When it finishes, launch the Windows Task Manager. Nothing new under Apps, or Programs (depending on your version of Windows), so look in the Background Processes. Ah, there’s the executable, but why is it listed here? And why is there only one instance? The VI clearly looped 3 times, and there were no errors. Go to the directory where the test application is located and open its INI file. There are your answers. There is only one instance running because the INI file has multiple instances turned off, and the one executable that did launch shows up as a background process because the INI file also says to hide the root window. Leave the root window setting the way it is, but change the AllowMutipleInstances to True, and save and close the file.

Now back in the Task Manager, abort the one instance of the test application that is running now, and rerun Launch 3x.vi. You should see when it finishes that there are now 3 instances of the test application running. The instances were given sequential TCP/IP port numbers from 3365 to 3367.

Firing Remote Events

The next thing I want to do is open the front panels of the 3 instances so we can observe their operation. Now if you look at the test application’s source code, there is a UDE that will make the front panel visible, so all I need to do is fire that event. But wait, those are three instances of a compiled executable — you can’t fire events in other executables! Well actually, you can. To see how, open the test VI, Open the Executable’s Window.vi.

No magic here. All the code is doing is dynamically running a VI. But check out the function before Open VI Reference, it’s called Open Application Reference. Its job is to open a reference to a copy of LabVIEW or the LabVIEW runtime engine that is running somewhere else. That “somewhere else” is defined in terms of a machine name and a port number or service name. The machine name can be a DNS name, an IP address or (as in our case here) localhost to point to the local computer.

By the way, if you think it sounds like I just said that you could make this same code access an executable residing on a remote computer by simply changing localhost to an IP address, your right. I did just say that.

But as cool as that feature might be, how does it allow me to fire an event in a compiled executable? Look at the name of the file being run: Open Window.lvlib:Generate Event.vi. It’s the VI that fires the event, and since VIs called in this way actually execute in the remote LabVIEW environment, the event gets fired in the targeted executable.

To see this code in action, run it three times with the port number 3365, 3366 and 3367. Three windows will open.

Setting Control Values

Another way of interacting with an executable is to directly manipulate controls on its front panel. However, if the target VI is event-driven like our test application, we need to remember that there is a difference between setting a value and firing any value change events associated with that control. If all you need to do is set a value, there is a VI method called Control Value:Set that will do the job nicely. However, if you want to fire the value change event you have to set the control’s Value(Signaling) property — which frankly is a bit more work.

This picture is the block diagram of the test VI Toggle the selector checkbox.vi, but the good news is that for this little bit of extra effort, you can set (or read) any control property that can be changed while a VI is running.

Shutting Down the Executable

Finally, we need to be able to stop an application that is running. But the problem here is figuring out how to test it such that we can see that it really did what it was supposed to do. The solution is to turn to the trace technique we discussed a while back when we were learning about command line arguments. I have written the code such that if the executable is run with the argument “d1” in the command line, the code will write a line to the trace file saying how the instance was stopped. And to help demonstrate how this works, I have created a test VI (Stop the Executable.vi) that can execute some of these termination paths.

To start off, leave both controls in their default state, and run the VI. This example stops the targeted executable by clicking the Stop button on its front panel. The instance with the port number 3365 will immediately close.

Now increment the Port Number to 3366 and set the Method control to Windows shutdown - Forced. This example stops the targeted executable by telling to Windows to abort it. The instance with the port number 3366 will immediately close.

Finally, we want to test the remaining instance’s response to the Application Instance Close event. To do that, restart your computer now. (That’s right, restart your computer. Don’t stop anything, don’t shut anything down — just restart.) When your computer is restarted and you are logged back in, go to the directory where the test application is installed and open the trace file. You will see two lines that look something like this:

07:29:39 05/24/2015 -- Shutdown 3365 -- Just Stop
07:42:52 05/24/2015 -- Shutdown 3367 -- Appl Inst Close

The second line shows that when you restarted your computer Windows did in fact generate the Application Instance Close? event and the application caught the event. You’ll note that there is no entry for the instance with the port number 3366. Remember, we stopped it by forcing an abort and a Windows abort is very much like clicking the red abort button when LabVIEW is running a VI: It just stops. No orderly shutdown. No deinitialization.

A Small Test Executable — Release 1
Toolbox — Release 9

The Big Tease

So that was, I hope, interesting. Starting next time I’m going to start delving into how to use LabVIEW code as the data collection and control backend for an application that has as its only customer-facing interface a web site. While there are many companies offering options that claim to be developer-friendly I have found that many of the marketing claims are largely based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). Simply put, they build up a “strong man” of supposed complexity and complication, and then tell you that the best (and perhaps, only) way to get past this obstacle is to buy their product. The truth, however, is that their “strong man” is really made of straw, and if you understand how it all fits together, doing it yourself isn’t really very hard.

Until Next Time…

Mike…

Making UDEs Easy

Posted on 2014-10-232015-12-17 by mlportersr

For the very first post on this blog, I presented a modest proposal for an alternative implementation of the LabVIEW version of the producer/consumer design pattern. I also said that we would be back to talk about it a bit more — and here we are!

The point of the original post was to present the modified design pattern in a form similar to that used for the version of the pattern that ships with LabVIEW. The problem is that while it demonstrates the interaction between the two loops, the structure cannot be expanded very far before you start running into obstacles. For example, it’s not uncommon to have the producer and consumer loops in separate VIs. Likewise, as with a person I recently dealt with on the forums, you might want to have more than one producer loop passing data to the same consumer. In either case, explicitly passing around a reference complicates matters because you have to come up with ways for all the separate processes to get the references they need.

The way around this conundrum lies in the concept of information hiding and the related process of encapsulation.

Moving On

The idea behind information hiding is that you want to hide from a function any information that it doesn’t need to do its job. Hiding information in this sense makes code more robust because what a routine doesn’t know about it can’t break. Encapsulation is an excellent way if implementing information hiding.

In the case of our design pattern, the information that is complicating things is the detailed logic of how the user event is implemented, and the resulting event reference. What we need is a way to hide the event logic, while retaining the functionality. We can accomplish this goal by encapsulating the data passing logic in a set of VIs that hide the messy details about how they do their job.

Standardizing User-Defined Events

The remainder of this post will present a technique that I have used for several years to implement UDEs. The code is not particularly difficult to build, but if you are a registered subscriber the code can be downloaded from the site’s Subversion SCC server.

The first thing we need to do is think a bit and come up with a list of things that a calling program would legitimately need to do with an event — and it’s actually a pretty short list.

Register to Receive the Event
Generate the Event
Destroy the Event When the Process Using it Stops

This list tells us what VIs the calling VI will need. However, there are a couple more objects that those VIs will be needed internally. One is a VI that will generate and store the event reference, the other is a type definition defining the event data.

Finally, if we are going to be creating 4 VIs and a typedef for each event in a project, we are going to need some way of keeping things organized. So let’s define a few conventions for ourselves.

Convention Number 1

To make it easy to identify what event VI performs a given function, let’s standardize the names. Thus, any VI that creates an event registration will be called Register for Event.vi. The other two event interface VI will, likewise, have simple, descriptive names: Generate Event.vi and Destroy Event.vi. Finally, the VI that gets the event reference for the interface VIs, shall be called Get Event Reference.vi and the typedef that defines the event data will be Event Data.ctl.

But doesn’t LabVIEW require unique VI names? Yes, you are quite right. LabVIEW does indeed require unique VI names. So you can’t have a dozen VIs all named Generate Event.vi. Thus we define:

Convention Number 2

All 5 files associated with an event shall be associated with a LabVIEW library that is named the same as the event. This action solves the VI Name problem because LabVIEW creates a fully-qualified VI name by concatenating the library name and the VI file name. For example, the name of the VI that generates the Pass Data event would have the name:
Pass Data.lvlib:Generate Event.vi
While the VI Name of the VI that generates the Stop Application event would be:
Stop Application.lvlib:Generate Event.vi

The result also reads pretty nice. Though, it still doesn’t help the OS which will not allow two files with the same name to coexist in the same directory. So we need:

Convention Number 3

The event library file, as well as the 5 files associated with the event, will reside in a directory with the same name as the event — but without the lvlib file extension. Hence Pass Data.lvlib, and the 5 files associated with it would reside in the Pass Data directory, while Stop Application.lvlib and its 5 files would be found in the directory Stop Application.

So do you have to follow these conventions? No of course not, but as conventions go, they make a lot of sense logically. So why not just use them and save your creative energies for other things…

The UDE Files

So now that we have places for our event VIs to be saved, and we don’t have to worry about what to name them, what do the VIs themselves look like? As I mentioned before, you can grab a working copy from our Subversion SCC server. The repository resides at:

http://svn.NotaTameLion.com/blogProject/ude_templates

To get started, you can simply click on the link and the Subversion web client will let you grab copies of the necessary files. You’ll notice that when you get to the SCC directory, it only has two files in it: UDE.zip and readme.pdf. The reason for the zip file is that I am going to be using the files inside the archive as templates and don’t want to get them accidentally linked to a project. The readme file explains how to use the templates, and you should go through that material on your own. What I want to cover here is how the templates work.

Get Event Reference.vi

This VI’s purpose is to create, and store for reuse, a reference to the event we are creating. Given that description, you shouldn’t be too surprised to see that it is built around the structure of a functional global variable, or FGV. However, instead of using an input from the caller to determine whether it needs to create a reference, it tests the reference in the shift-register and if it is invalid, creates a reference. If the reference is valid, it passes out the one already in the shift-register.

If you consider the constant that is defining the event datatype, you observe two things. First, you’ll see that it is a scalar variant. For events that essentially operate like triggers and so don’t have any real data to pass, this configuration works fine. Second, there is a little black rectangle in the corner of the constant indicating that it is a typedef (Event Data.ctl). This designation is important because it significantly simplifies code modification.

If the constant were not a typedef, the datatype of the event reference would be a scalar variant and any change to it would mean that the output indicator would have to be recreated. However, with the constant as a typedef, the datatype of the event is the type definition. Consequently you can modify the typedef any way you want and every place the event reference is used will automatically track the change.

Register for Event.vi

This VI is used wherever a VI needs to be able to respond to the associated event. Due to the way events operate, multiple VIs can, and often will, register to receive the same event. As you look at the template block diagram, however, you’ll something is missing: the registration output. The reason for this omission lies in how LabVIEW names events.

When LabVIEW creates an event reference it naturally needs to generate a name for the event. This name is used in event structures to identify the specific particular event handler that will be responding to an event. To obtain the name that it will use, LabVIEW looks for a label associated with the event reference wire. In this case, the event reference is coming from a subVI, so LabVIEW uses the label of the subVI indicator as the event name. Unfortunately, if the name of this indicator changes after the registration reference indictor is created, the name change does not get propagated. Consequently, this indicator can only be created after you have renamed the output of the Get Event Reference.vi subVI to the name that you wish the event to have.

The event naming process doesn’t stop with the event reference name. The label given to the registration reference can also become important. If you bundle multiple references together before connecting them to an event structure’s input dynamic event terminal, the registration indicator is added to the front of the event name. This fact has two implications:

You should keep the labels short

You can use these labels to further identify the event

You could, for example, identify events that are just used as triggers with the label trig. Alternately, you could use this prefix to identify the subsystem that is generating the event like daq or gui.

Generate Event.vi

The logic of this template is pretty straight-forward. The only noteworthy thing about it is that the event data (right now a simple variant) is a control on the front panel. I coded it this way to save a couple steps if I need to modify it for an event that is passing data. Changing the typedef will modify the front panel control, so all I have to do is attach it to a terminal on the connector pane.

Destroy Event

Again, this is very simple code. Note that this VI only destroys the event reference. If it has been registered somewhere, that registration will need to be destroyed separately.

Putting it all Together

So how would all this fit into our design pattern? The instructions in the readme file give the step-by-step procedure, but here is the result.

As explained in the instructions, I intend to use this example as a testbed of sorts to demonstrate some things, so I also modified the event data to be a numeric, and changed the display into a chart. You’ll also notice that the wire carrying the event reference is no longer needed. With the two loops thus disconnected from each other logically, it would be child’s play to restructure this logic to have multiple producer loops, or to have the producer loop(s) and the consumer loop(s) in separate VIs.

By the way, there’s no reason you can’t have multiple consumer loops too. You might find a situation where, for example, the data is acquired once a second, but the consumer loops takes a second and a half to do the necessary processing. The solution? Multiple consumer loops.

However, there is still one teeny-weensy problem. If you now have an application that consists of several parallel processes running in memory, how do you get them all launched in the proper order?

Until next time…

Mike…

Filling in the Blanks

Getting Registered

Keeping Time

Getting into the Publishing Business

Testing the Code

The Big Tease

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The Problem Defined

Getting Moving in the Right Direction

The Outside View

The Test Application

Crawling Under the Covers

Getting Down With the Acquisition

Let’s Build Some Code

How the Pieces Fit Together

The Big Tease

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What Can We Access?

Export Data from Plugins

Retrieve Graph Images from Plugins

Adding Remote Control

Some Things to Consider

Set the Acquisition Sample Interval

Set Number of Samples to Save

Set Temperature Controller Operating Limits

Building Out the Infrastructure

Introducing the Remote Access Engine

The Read Graph Data Event

The Read Graph Image Event

The Set Acquisition Rate Event

The Set Data Buffer Depth Event

The Set TC Parameters Event

Testing

The Big Tease

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The Basic Points

Creating the Constructor

Giving the Interface an Icon

Creating a Context Menu

Closing the Event Loop

Future Enhancements

The Big Tease

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What it does

Why This Interface?

How it Works in Theory…

…and in Practice

Getting Undocked

Docking a Window

The Big Tease

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First, we need an executable

Handling the front panel

VI Server Operations

What we can do with these controls

Launching the Executable

Firing Remote Events

Setting Control Values

Shutting Down the Executable

The Big Tease

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Moving On

Standardizing User-Defined Events

Convention Number 1

Convention Number 2

Convention Number 3

The UDE Files

Get Event Reference.vi

Register for Event.vi

Generate Event.vi

Destroy Event

Putting it all Together

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