A LabVIEW project that I have previously worked on had many different components, each with there own version numbering. A global variable was used to READ the version numbers when the application was run.
This worked well, but became rather cumbersome when we had to manually change the global variable each time we modified or built the application. This became apparent and very frustrating when a build would be run, which could easily take an hour or two to complete, and only when running the application did we realise that we forgot to update the global or save its default value.
I thought there must be an alternative so went about exploring the application properties and methods. As it turned out, it is really quick and easy to pull the application version number from the built executable in LabVIEW.
Only two property nodes and one method are needed to get the version number from the built application. First you need to get the type of application that is being run. An enumerated type is returned and if this vi is run from within an application, the App.Kind property will be “Run TIme System”. In this case, pass in the path to the executable, and then get a reference to the FileVersionInfo. The FileVersion property can then be read. This will be the same value as set in the Version Information setting of the Application Properties.
The App.Kind property can be used in a number of ways when you want specific settings to be applied only when running in certain environments.
I hope you find this useful and as usual the project used in the post can be downloaded below.
Download Build Version Property
Greg