[Greg McKaskle]

The LabVIEW project folders are actually lists of references, sorta like shortcuts or aliases. It allows you to link together virtually anything from anywhere and call it a project. When things are not moving around much, this works very well and is ultimately flexible. But when files move, it more or less tells you that and expects you to resolve or fix the project.

The way to tell where files come from is to flip to the files tab in the explorer window. Pretty quickly, you will see that most of your files come from one folder hierarchy, and then there is this special one that is on the desktop. That doesn't make it a mistake or cause any problems, but it lets you know that your files are in more than one location, and which is the odd bird.

Dependencies:
They are files that your project needs/uses that you have not added to your project. If you start a new project and create a new VI called Untitled, then place a subVI called A out of some library on the diagram. You are dependent on A, so it must be in the project somewhere. But since you didn't write it or explicitly add it to your project as a source file, LV instead puts it into the dependency folder. If A internally calls B and C, you will find them there too, which is the more useful element of dependencies. If you learn that C had a bug in it, you may wonder ... I don't remember using C ... I wonder if the bug impacts me. If it is in dependencies, then there is some form of dependency, and you can open C and learn about the calling instances.

You can also drag dependencies up into your project folders to declare that you want the file to be added to the project and tracked regardless of whether it is being called. I occasionally make my own folders and drag things from dependencies to put then into my own organization and tidy things up.

Greg McKaskle