Remove Specific Files from a Project Without Deleting

[jamespherman]

A common operation in the Lab that I work in is:

Take a basic VI and modify it for a specific experimental purpose. The way we have done this in the past is by using "Save As..." and selecting: "Open Additional Copy" (and adding this file to the single project that we use for all our LabView work; probably a foolish thing to do right off the bat, having only one project). However, we recently ran into some issues with this (surprise surprise) because one user modified a subVI that was referenced by several superVIs. Thus, we decided instead to start using individual projects, and duplicating any relevant hierarchy to avoid editing common files.

The first time we tried to do this, we used "Save As..." and"Duplicate Hierarchy," subsequently saving the new files to a new project. However, the duplicated files were somehow added to the original project as well. The result is that there are several conflicts each time files are loaded from either project. The obvious way to solve this problem is to remove the overlapping files from the original project, but I can find no such way to simply remove them without deleting the files! This is a serious nuissance. Any ideas anybody?

[RavensFan]

If you are in the items view of the project, select the VI and pick "Remove from Project".  It won't delete the file.

When you create a new project, it is best to put the project file and any subVI's associated with it in its own subdirectory separate from any other project files.

Unfortunately, you'll have to work through the conflicts one by one.  If you look in the Files View of the project (by the way, which version of LV are you using?), you'll be able to see if any referenced VI's point to locations outside of your designated project directory.

I'm sure some people will suggest you use a source control program.  I won't because I have no experience with that.  I will recommend that you make frequence backups of your project directory and files to other locations.  Perhaps even off computer.  That way you have a place to go back to and find recent source code in the event you ever really get things mixed up.

By the way, your usericon in the forums is only showing up as a red X.  You should post a message to this thread or to your image gallery and link your icon to that rather than posting it to some 3rd party webserver others may not have access to.

[jamespherman · Accepted solution]

RF --

Thanks for the response. I guess that's the brute force way to go, I was just wondering if there was a more general way to specifically remove references to individual or multiple files. Thanks also for pointing out the icon snafu.

-- jph