Opening Labview Programs : Desktop Only???

As my code has become more and more complicated, I notice that it takes longer and longer to open because I am using more and more VI’s. I tried to open my programs on other places on my laptop, yet it seems like the only place where the program will actually fin the VI’s is whn it is on the desktop. If it is not on the desktop, it will search for a long time, until I get bored and click ignore item to all of them, at which point my program is filled with a bunch of VIs which are just question marks. I talked to our programming mentor about this, and he said it was B.S. that I could not save and run my programs in other places. I also tried changing the location for where the search starts, but that did not help either.

Any ideas on why this is happening?

When LV saves a hierarchy of VIs, it saves a relative path from every calling VI to every subVI. So if VI A calls B calls C, then the saved version will have a relative path from A to B saved in A, and a relative path from B to C saved in B.

This works well in most cases, but if you move things around on disk, the relative path will no longer work. When LV loads a VI and that VI references subVIs, it takes the relative paths to subVIs, combines them with the VI to get the expected path to the subVIs and tries to load from that location. If the file doesn’t exist there, it then checks to see if it is in memory, then starts down the search path which includes vi.lib and other locations.

Anyway, it is likely that there is something you are doing to the disk files that is causing LV loading to fail. Hope this helps.

Greg McKaskle