How to monitor front panels of reentrant VI's during development

[dacad]

One tool I always have used during development is to monitor the front panels of key sub-vi's to see what is being returned on many of the indicators.  These would be indicators that were not tied to the connector pane but simply shown, well, to monitor during development.

I have found that when I make a sub-vi reentrant, I have lost the ability to display a 'live' front panel that shows what is happeing during execution.

Long story short, is there any way I can monitor each (or any) implementation of a reentrant vi front panel while I do my development?  I could temporarily make it non-reentrant but that seems like a cheap work-around.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Doug

[MIG]

What version of LabVIEW do you have?

With recent versions of LabVIEW you should be able to do this, provided the reentrant VIs are set to "Preallocated clone reentrant execution" rather than "Shared clone reentrant execution".

With old versions of LabVIEW (prior to LabVIEW 8 or maybe 2009?) you couldn't do this.

[nathand]

Which version of LabVIEW? Are you using pre-allocated clones, or shared clones? In recent versions, if you open a reentrant VI by double-clicking its icon on the block diagram of the calling VI, it will open a clone of the reentrant VI with its own front panel. This works at least for pre-allocated clones, but maybe not for shared clones.

[Todd_Lesher]

In case you haven't seen it: Ctrl-I (or File -> VI Properties) -> Window Appearance -> Customize... -> Show front panel when called.

This does the same thing as Invoke Node Front Panel Open on a This VI reference.

[dacad]

Had to post and leave yesterday.  LV 2011.  Using preallocated clones.   Tried opening the clone before and during execution but it didn't do anything.  Even tried opening the editable version and didn't get anything.  Failed to consider show front panel when called.  Will try that first thing and advise on results.

Thanks for the input.

[dacad]

Checking show front panel when called did the trick. Of course it shows every front panel when called even when you don't need it so the trick is to arrange the panels so the un-needed ones are out of the way.  Even with two screens, it gets crowded.

Thanks

[nathand]

Are you calling your reentrant VIs dynamically? If so, then opening the cloned front panels won't work. However, if you're calling them as a normal subVI, there should be no problem. If you don't see the cloned front panels open, post a simple pair of VIs that demonstrates how you have it configured (for example one top-level VI, and a reentrant subVI that's called in more than one location within the top-level VI).