I’m lucky enough to have a new project that will be developed in LabVIEW 8.6, so I get to use various new features (like Darren’s awesome Quick Drop tool).
When jumping head first into a new LabVIEW version there are bound to be some unknowns. In my case, I noticed that, after saving my project (.lvproj) file, an .lvlps file showed up in my project folder (right next to the .lvproj file).
What's that new .lvlps file?
So, I opened up the .lvlps file in a text editor and saw that it contained the following:
[ProjectWindow_Data]
ProjectExplorer.ClassicPosition[String] = “59,221,459,571″
It appeared to store some window settings for my project.
Figuring there’s probably something in the LabVIEW help about this file, I search the LabVIEW help for “lvlps” and found the “LabVIEW File Extensions” help page.
.lvlps
File that stores project settings that are specific to the local machine. You should not check .lvlps files into source control because .lvlps files contain settings specific to the computer you are using; for example, .lvlps files contain the local source code control configuration. LabVIEW saves .lvlps files when you save a project, and correctly renames the file when you rename a project. You can remove or delete .lvlps files without affecting the performance or behavior of a project because .lvlps files only contain project settings specific to the local machine. If you build an application, LabVIEW does not copy the .lvlps file into the built application.
Conclusion: OK, the .lvlps file contains my LabVIEW Local Project Settings. So, I don’t want to check it into Source Code Control, because each developer working on the project will probably have different settings and they aren’t really important enough to do change control.
Note: I kind of like how Apple Xcode project files (actually they are “package” folders — they just look like files, in the Finder) work. Your local Xcode project settings (like window positions) are stored in files that include the user’s name, so that you can, if you want, save them in source code control without developers overwriting each others’ settings. But, since Windows doesn’t really have a feature like “packages” (and LabVIEW needs to be multi-platform), I guess we’ll have to keep doing things the hard way.
FWIW: This was introduced in LabVIEW 8.5, I guess mainly to facilitate the per-project setting of source code control.
Jeffrey: Thanks for the info. I wonder why I didn’t noticed this file until now
Jim, thanks for sharing! Good to see LabVIEW documentation put to good use!
Susan: And, thank you for the great documentation
A little late on this thread, but I just updated all my google reader feeds to try and add in the different LabVIEW related blogs. All this information is correct, you won’t see the lvps in the project tree itself unless you use an auto-populating folder. It will exist on disk of course. At one point I think we considered storing the information in the project file or the ini file but storing in the project file wouldn’t work well with Source Control. There was some discussion about weather or not to show these types of files in auto-populating folders but didn’t do it because the auto-populating folders wouldn’t be accurate representations.
Hi Kamran: It’s great to hear from LabVIEW R&D on this. Thanks for sharing.
Despite what the NI guys say, the lvlps files were never around in LV 8.5. I never used 8.5.1, so maybe there is some confusion there. Thanks for the quick answer on whether or not they belong in source code control.
Very nice document!!!.. nice to know about this info because I think our code repository containsa lot of this .lvlps files… thanks.!!!.. thanks!!!..