LabVIEW crash loses Build Properties and Conditional Symbols

[BillMe]

I have had a couple of occasions where I had to kill LabVIEW 8.5 through the Task Manager. When next starting LabVIEW and recovering the .lvproj, both the Conditional Disable Symbols and the Build Properties are lost (both are empty).

Anyone know where this information is stored if not in the .lvproj? If in the .lvproj, why would this information be lost after a "successful" recovery? It's not fun recreating these lost properties, particularly the ones for the build.

[Wiebe@CARYA]

They are stored in the .lvproj file. The problem is that it's not backuped automatically, like VI's. I had the same problem with XControls...


The only remedy is to save the project after you've done major changes.


Regards,


Wiebe.

[ChristO25]

Hi Bill,

1) why do you have to kill LV 8.5 sometimes with the Task Manager?
2) I tried to reproduce this behavior with a small projekt but I was not able. Do you have selected also the *.lvproj file (and all subfiles) to be recovered?

regards

Chris

[BillMe]

The two occasions I've had to use Task Manager was because of my code (bug). The only two files that were listed for recovery were the .lvproj and a shared library. I only selected the .lvproj as the shared library had a fairly old time stamp.

I always save my project after any changes, that's why I was surprised to note that my build settings (which I change rarely) and my conditional disable symbols (of which I only change their value) were lost.

My project is fairly large with over 200 VI's, many using Open FPGA references, many conditional disable structures, two FPGA targets on a Windows PXI, a Realtime PXI target and within it, two more FPGA targets.

[Yi Y]

Hi Bill,
You can create a simple test project, and open up the .lvprj file in notepad to see the build settings conditional disable symbols being saved in the xml script.  It's odd that you lost those settings, but they are indeed saved in the .lvprj file.

Yi Y.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/support

[BillMe]

Thanks. I'll play around and see how much editing I can get away with in the .lvproj file itself.

Message Edited by Bill@NGC on 09-11-2007 08:19 PM

[Bob Schneider]

I have been experiencing this same problem lately, however not with the type of crashes found here.  Occasionally on startup (of 8.5) I'll get a message that LabVIEW crashed or had some problem the last time it ran/shut down and it wants to recover a file or whatever.  And yes, it's losing all of my conditional disable symbols and build specifications.  I can set these values, save the project, exit LabVIEW, start LabVIEW back up and the values will still be there.  This will be fine for awhile and then suddenly the settings will be gone.  Just 5 minutes ago I was running my app and ran into an error due to the fact that the symbol was "set" incorrectly, or rather as I found out, it didn't even exist anymore.

I have no idea what is necessarily causing this behavoir, but it seems that anytime a backup is being made that the conditional disable symbols and the build specifications are not being "written" to the backup, so when a recovery has to take place, there are no values to repopulate the project with.

I'm guessing from the lack of other posts in this thread or the existence of other posts on the forums that others don't appear to be having this issue, but it's pretty strange and annoying at times.  Thankfully I don't have that many symbols that I have to reenter.

[Yi Y]

Hi Bob,
Is the behavior of this reproducible? It's possible that it's a corrupt lvproj file. Did you upgrade from LabVIEW 8.2 to 8.5? Did you re-create the project after you upgrade?

Thanks!

Yi Y.
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/support

[Bob Schneider]

The project that I was referring to was originally created in 8.2 a few months ago.  It was upgraded to 8.5 sometime in late December or early January.

For reproducabillity, at least on my system, try the following:

1) Create a blank project
2) Create a Conditional Disable Symbol for the project
3) Save the project
4) Add a VI to your project (without a VI in your project, LabVIEW does not seem to care if you have "unsaved" changes to the project file if the application crashes)
4) Wait for your "automatically recover" timer to elapse (default is set to 5 minutes)
5) Open task manager and crash LabVIEW.exe
6) Reopen LabVIEW
7) When prompted if you want to recover your project file, say yes
😎 Check for the existance of the Conditional Disable Symbol  (on my testing, the symbol is gone)

I didn't have too much time to play around with this, but I'm assuming the same things happen with parameters in a build specification.

The system that I am performing this testing on has a clean install of LabVIEW 8.5 (fresh from the standpoint that it was a clean windows xp format, so no previously existing NI software/hardware/registry keys/etc.). This is also the system that I have been developing in and found these problems on.

[Neil.Pate]

I have had many problems with the LV 8.5 project (fresh projects started in 8.5), different projects, different crash causes, same result - corrupted project file or missing conditional symbols or build properties.

The hard way has taught me to make manual backups of the .lvproj file periodically, and to know how to edit it by hand if necessary.

I have found it is very easy to crash the project by moving multiple files around using the Files view of the project explorer, often it gets totally confused with nested directories.

Of course it is very difficult to make a trivial example to highlight these problems, the behaviour only seems to occur in larger projects.

Holding thumbs this has been fixed in 8.5.1