This attached file is a picture that shows the outcome of current drag and drop UI setup (above the box), and the desired drag and drop UI setup (below the box).
As you can see above the box, when I drag and drop each channel that a user could select for a single digital output, the controls are numerics by default. It would be quite tedious for a user to drag and drop each required channel, and then interpret the channel's function based on its name alone. Below the box, I right clicked a channel from the tree, and then selected a control based on the datatype that makes sense with respect to the channel's function. It makes sense that the controls are numerics by default because in the Set Channel Value.vi (part of Custom Device API library), the only accepted datatype is Double. However, it would be nice to be able to set a channel's datatype in a custom device's configuration VI. Channel, folder, and device properties can be set using a polymorphic VI that supports many data types. I propose that channel values could be handled in a similar way. Then in the VeriStand UI, when a channel is drag and dropped from the system definition tree, it could be recognized as Boolean, ring, numeric, etc...
Further desireable functionality would include a custom control which would allow the user to drag a single channel from the system definition tree. The custom control would be composed of multiple programmer-defined controls whose data would be passed to the driver in a cluster since there could be multiple datatypes. Using the attached file as a visual example, the custom control would programatically update its appearance based on the desired output mode (discrete, PWM, or encoder).
