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Chapter 7.d. from book 'A Tour on uCANca'

Labview VI project skeleton generation

Automated testing is a nowadays must-have. To develop testing setups in parallel with system development is painful, as any little change in the name, position, type or transfer function of a flow must be propagated from the development team to the testing team.

One of the most boring task when using LabView to design automated testing setups is creating the controls of every input and output in the system. Normally the user must replicate same VI control for each flow having same flow type and flow direction. And renaming it. And adjusting transfer function or validity ranges. And selecting the concrete input pin.

uCANca preserves the user patience by avoiding manual work of this type. It does it in two steps:

  • Generates an XML description file of all the inputs and output flows of the project.
  • Gives the user a VI converter project that is able to parse this XML and create programatically a new VI with all the controls correctly created from some control patterns defined by the user.

You can find the last version of the VI converter project in the wiki page that describes it.

Generating the I/O XML description file.

You can obtain it by clicking on the link “IOX XML I/O description (for LabView, etc.)” in the projects detail page: http://ucanca.gatatac.org/projects/1-electric-car/gen_code.iox

Generating the VI project skeleton

Open the VI converter project in LabView.

Copy the contents of the downloaded IOX (I/O XML description file) inside the VI converter project xml box control.

After that, you can edit the default controls for each flow type and direction. After that you can press “Start” on LabView.

The VI Scripting tools included in the VI converter project will create a new blank VI project and generate programatically the flow controls of the project.

You can see a result of having executed the VI converter project in this screenshot:

/attachments/download/33

Next chapter Conclusion

See this page on wiki: LabView VI Project Skeleton