dvase - 2013-03-15

So I have been using metadiff with lvdiff and TortoiseSVN for a few years now, and it was only recently that I discovered this neat feature that I think should be more widely known.

To tell LabView what parts of a VI to compare, set the following flags in the "LabVIEW.ini" file in the base path of the LabView install. For example, in LabView 2011 it can be found here:
C:\Program Files\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2011\LabVIEW.ini

Simply add the following section to the LabVIEW.ini file:

[lvdiff]
flags="T,T,T,T,T,T"

The true/false flags stand for the following VI attribute:
Front Panel, Front Panel pos/size, Block Diagram, Block Diagram cosmetic, Block Diagram pos/size

For example, if you want to have LabView ignore all the cosmetic Block Diagram differences, you would use the following flags:
flags="T,T,T,T,F,T"

I hope someone else finds this useful, I only wish I knew about this ability sooner.  Of course, I would ideally like the ability to interactive sort and filter the changes in the LabView comparison VI, but I believe that modification would require access to password protection National Instruments VIs, if only LabView were open-source, sigh…