I am having trouble getting the terminals to pass any data to what they are connected to because the controls they connect to are in a while loop. My frustration level is high since I would have already had this done if I wrote it in C.
First, let me say this might get a little long so if you don't want to read it, then don't. Here goes. I have watched a couple of tutorials, read a lot, and even tried a few things out in code. I get why this can't be done directly in a while loop. Having said that, it seems that I have no choice but to use while loop(s) in my VI.
My VI is loosely based on Queued Message Handler in the Templates section of creating a new VI. I have 2 things that must take place. One - I have created a TCP client where I constantly send messages to get status from the equipment I am communicating with. This is a timed event and must be handled in a while loop so I can maintain the connection to the server. I am not doing the Open, Send, Close, Reopen, Send, Close, etc. type of message handling. Too inefficient. This is the lower half of the example template.
Second - On occasion the user will press a button on the front panel which creates a message that is sent to the equipment to make it do something. And this, it would seem, needs to be in a while loop also, hence my problem. Some/most of the controls exist with the event structure. This is the top half of the example template.
I actually have this working as a front panel, but every thing is in just one while loop and I cannot get the terminals to work. Here is where my confusion comes in, if I am passing something to the while loop, I only get its value once and if it changes, you don't get that change, and if you are passing the data out of the while loop, you only get it when the loop ends. These two things are really baffling me. How can pass data that changes while using a while loop, because I have to, but the while loop breaks using the terminals. Seems circular. The TCP communications cannot stop, and I cannot find an example of how to do this using my friend Google. Am I the only person on this planet that needs to do this? Doubt it.
Not going to show my code, as this in not a code problem. It is an understanding how LabView does things vs. how you would just write the code in C using some library. And also just being unfamiliar with all the things you can do in LabView, not to mention how things are different. I don't know what I don't know, but I can learn.
I want to be able to give the VI I have created to any user and let them use it to control my equipment. If they just want to run it as a front panel, or if they want to use it as a Sub VI that is OK too. I just need to be able to make the terminals actually pass data when used that way.
Thanks, I did order a book on LabView today, but I won't get it soon. I really need to put this problem to bed.
Cannot help that much without seeing the code. But I can try to give you a little bit of an idea of what is going on.
Dataflow is an important concept to understand in LabVIEW. elements (VIs, loops, etc.) will not start until all of their inputs (ie. terminals) have been received or set by something called before, and then they only take their inputs once. If your terminal is outside the loop, then the loop can only read it's starting value. (See "Infinite Loops" on this page). A simple way of solving this would be to put the terminal inside of the loop rather than outside, so it is then read on every iteration of the loop.
As for passing values outside of the loop, there are a number of methods for this. Again, because of dataflow, you will not usually be able to access the value of something inside the loop until the loop finishes executing. However, there are a number of ways to read those values in a different loop. Local or global variables would be the simplest way, but they are not recommended by NI. The proper way of handling this is using something on the synchronization pallet. More info on the options can be found here.
Seeing as you are basing something on the Queued Message Handler, a queue might be a good way to start. LabVIEW has built in examples of code to show you how to use these functions.
Loop synchronization and asynchronous programming are fundamental concepts for writing LabVIEW code. If these are not concepts you are familiar with, I would say that you will gain a lot from showing others your actual code and having people help you with the issues. If you are concerned about sharing something proprietary, try making a simple example and posting that code instead to understand the concepts better.
Event structure to react to evr8and functional global to pass data out.
Suggest pasting block diagram.
Related
I am creating a 3-D game with a cave as the main environment. The cave is made of a large number of ring segments, one attached to the other, thus creating a currently small tunnel system.
If the Player is inside the cave, only a small part of the segments are visible. I am figuring that actually hiding the not-visible segments could save a lot of gpu time, which I need for other objects like buildings or enemies.
So what I try to do first is hiding the entire cave and then unhiding the visible segments by turning ‚node.isHidden’ true and false.
The particular nodes are being found and accessed by their names: ‚Node.childnode (withName: „XYZ003“, recursively: false).isHidden = true‘ (or false).
It works to the point where the segments are unhidden, but once I am trying to hide a previously unhidden segment, the renderer crashes with an EXC_BAD_ACCESS.
Doing the hiding on a hidden object (of course useless, but helping to understand the problem) is fine, so is unhiding unhidden segments.
Following the hint of another thread, I moved the routine into the renderer delegate so not doing the switching during the wrong time, but instead during the phase in which such changes are supposed to happen, but this did not help.
As an alternative, I did the hiding (and unhiding) by SCNActions, but I received the same result, which really puzzles me, as this would be kind of the ‚official way‘ to do it...
I also played around with the ‚recursively’ boolean, getting the same outcome (works for unhide, crashes on isHidden = true).
Then I tried to change opacity or other properties of the nodes - which worked perfectly. On the other hand, trying to remove the nodes from the parent resulted in the mentioned crash as well.
I need this to work, because older hardware could never cope with several thousand nodes (trying this, the frame rate dropped to 10fps, even without enemies around). And newer hardware might break down once the enemies appear...
My thinking is that the pointer is somehow messed up by the first unhiding (and hence the BAD_ACCESS error), so maybe an additional bonding (often seen with spritekit-routines) or another way to get the node-pointer could be the solution. On the other hand, if the pointer is broken, why can I still access all other properties? Maybe it‘s the subnodes that cause the problem - everyone of the nodes has 20 subnodes, which are supposed to change visibility, too.
Did anyone come across this behavior before me? I could not find anything during my google-research...
Hiding and unhiding nodes frequently is typically not a problem by itself. You can hide a main node and any sub-nodes of the main node will automatically hide themselves, so you shouldn't have to loop them individually.
I'm not an expert debugger and don't know your skill level, but BAD_ACCESS can mean that you tried to send a msg to a block of memory that can't execute the message or whenever the app tried to deference a corrupt pointer. Search "What Is EXC_BAD_ACCESS and How to Debug It" for a decent tutorial on some options for dealing with it.
I do my changes in the render delegate as well, but depending on the number of changes and how long they take, I sometimes use timers to control the amount of changes that can be made in a certain amount of time. That way, and after some adjustments, I'm pretty sure that I'm not bogging it down to a point where it just spirals out of control.
Structure can matter - personal preference, but I try to setup an array of classes that create individual nodes (and sub-nodes) and therefore have direct access to them. That way I'm not iterating through the whole node structure or finding nodes by name. Sometimes a lot is going on before I really have to make a modification to the node itself and so I can loop through my array of classes, check values, compare, etc. before taking action that involves the display. That also gives me a chance to remove particle systems, remove actions, set geometry = nil and update logic counters when I need to remove a node.
I'm sure opinions vary, but this has worked well for me. Once I standardized the structure, I just keep repeating the pattern.
Hope that helps
I am working on a Winform program that uses Access (unfortunately, my firm isn't willing to go for a non-shared-drive-only server at this point) and VB.NET. I have a report that takes and displays data from the database for particular deals that works 95% of the time. 5% of the time, though, it crashes. I know that it has nothing to do with the code itself, because when it crashes is totally irrespective of which deal is being displayed. I can also consistently crash the program by clicking the triggering "View Deal" button repeatedly (this is after experimenting with sleeping the thread and disabling the button while the code executes).
The typical error when the program crashes relates to the processing of the data I'm doing before displaying it. For instance, I add a total row to the data table for some of the cash flows and then sum it up in VB. I then bind this to a DataGridView. During a crash, though, the error message says that the first column I reference doesn't exist.
Does anyone have any thoughts on how to get VB.NET to treat this synchronously? I know that Access is slow to begin with, but it's even worse when it's being used over a network (as in my case), so I want to be able to prevent this sort of thing from happening to my users.
Thanks
Rob
I think it was concurrency, so thanks to user2864740. It was concurrency in a roundabout way, though. I had several sub calls to a sub that would run a query and then add a row to a DataGridView. It turns out that I wasn't closing the connection in the sub each time, so when I tried to "bust" the program by repeatedly running the code, Access became overloaded with connections. Eventually, the code tried to move beyond the queries, since they wouldn't run anyway, and that's why I was getting issues with the DataGridView.
Hope this helps someone in the future.
Im trying to sort an Array of NSDates using the sortedArrayWithOptions:usingComparator: - method od NSArray. So far all is very well and my code works as expected.
However, seeing that i can specify options for the method to use, i went into the docs and tried to figure out what they mean.
Theres NSSortStable, of course: Objects that have the same Value should be returned in the order they existed in before the sort. Thats easy enough, i guess.
But im somewhat stumped as to what NSSortConcurrent means. This is what the docs say:
Specifies that the Block sort operation should be concurrent.
This option is a hint and may be ignored by the implementation under some circumstances;
the code of the Block must be safe against concurrent invocation.
Available in Mac OS X v10.6 and later.
So i understand that i can allow the use of multiple threads for the sorting operation? thats great. In this case, is "save against concurrent invocations" just fancy talk for "thread-safe"? And if it isnt, what does it mean? Im sorry for this rather stupid question, but im not a native english speaker. Thanks.
Never mind, i figured ot out. NSSortConcurrent will indeed allow the sorting operation to use multiple threads, and thus the only rewuirement is for the sorting block to be thread-safe. As long as youre not touching any data that is located outside the block (so dont use __block-variables) you should be fine.
I've been using the Game State Management sample which has worked so far. I've hit a snag though: when Tombstoning, the screens are serialised; the only trouble is, the MessageBoxScreen has event handlers for Accepted and Cancelled.
What's the best way to serialise these? I did a bit of research on using Expression Trees but this seemed overly complex for what I wanted to do.
How do you serialise these? Or... What alternative approach do you use to save the state of a screen that contains delegates?
I'd definitely steer clear of attempting to serialize anything remotely resembling a lambda, or for that matter, named methods. Remember: you're storing state, and nothing else.
Depending on how far and wide your various assignments to these delegates are, you might be able to get away with maintaining a Dictionary<String, WhateverDelagateType>, serializing the keys and looking up the callbacks after deserialization.
Another thing to consider--I'm no expert, but reading between the lines it sounds as if you're working towards tombstoning a very temporary modal dialog. Do you really want that? You might be better off bringing your user right to the high scores table, or whatever follows your dialog, on his/her return.
I decided against this. I instead persists game flow as a kind of 'flow chart'.
The flow chart is declared in code and has properties 'LastShape' and 'LastResultFromShape'.
In my code, I rebuild the flow chart definitions each time, something like this:
flowChart.AddShape( "ShowSplash" );
flowChart.AddLine( "MainMenu", ()=>lastResult=="Clicked" || lastResult=="TimedOut");
flowChart.AddShape( "MainMenu");
flowChart.AddLine( #"ShowOptions", ()=>lastResult=="OptionsClicked");
flowChar.AddLine( #"ShowSplash", ()=>lastResult==#"TimedOut");
etc.etc.
The flow goes from the top down, so 'AddLine' relates to the last shape added.
After tombstoning, I just read the last shape and the last result and decide where to go in the flowchart based on that.
I have a reasonable number of records in an Azure Table that I'm attempting to do some one time data encryption on. I thought that I could speed things up by using a Parallel.ForEach. Also because there are more than 1K records and I don't want to mess around with continuation tokens myself I'm using a CloudTableQuery to get my enumerator.
My problem is that some of my records have been double encrypted and I realised that I'm not sure how thread safe the enumerator returned by CloudTableQuery.Execute() is. Has anyone else out there had any experience with this combination?
I would be willing to bet the answer to Execute returning a thread-safe IEnumerator implementation is highly unlikely. That said, this sounds like yet another case for the producer-consumer pattern.
In your specific scenario I would have the original thread that called Execute read the results off sequentially and stuff them into a BlockingCollection<T>. Before you start doing that though, you want to start a separate Task that will control the consumption of those items using Parallel::ForEach. Now, you will probably also want to look into using the GetConsumingPartitioner method of the ParallelExtensions library in order to be most efficient since the default partitioner will create more overhead than you want in this case. You can read more about this from this blog post.
An added bonus of using BlockingCollection<T> over a raw ConcurrentQueueu<T> is that it offers the ability to set bounds which can help block the producer from adding more items to the collection than the consumers can keep up with. You will of course need to do some performance testing to find the sweet spot for your application.
Despite my best efforts I've been unable to replicate my original problem. My conclusion is therefore that it is perfectly OK to use Parallel.ForEach loops with CloudTableQuery.Execute().