Pinning may have not been used by some users because the feature was never fully implemented to it's full potential.
Pinning use cases:
1) Add pinning back, and with the feature to save/retrieve (to file) pinned channels. Without this feature, pinning is only useful if they are utilized by a script or a dialog.
2) Change Analysis panel dialogs to use pinned channels as the default selection when they are called through the Dialog menu interface. This feature would allow users to pick a set of channels to work on, and then quickly perform data manipulation and analysis on the channels without the need to specify them in every Analysis dialog.
3) User custom scripts benefit considerably from channel "pinning". Combined with the option to retrieve/save pinned channels, you can easily write a script that can quickly perform an operation on sets of channels. The only other way to do this is to have the user pick the channels through a dialog (something that I had to recently create because the pinning feature was lost to my many custom scripts).
The CNH Industrial Mission Data Management System, uses the Data Portal "pinning" feature extensively. Contact Perry Andrews. One of the many implementations was to allow users to pin channels of interest and save/retrieve them. This was important when you were dealing with many channels from CAN/LIN data and needed to retain references to sets of files for particular situations (engine performance, emissions, etc.). I was actually surprised that NI never picked up on the concept of allowing users to save/retrieve pinned channels in this way.
The pinning feature is very easy to use. I trained over 100 users globally on the use of the CNH MDMS (Europe, NA, Asia) and despite the language challenge, they picked up on the concept immediately, as evidenced by their ability to use that feature to go through exercises I prepared for them.
A little background here might help. DIAdem 2019 expanded the maximum number of channels the Data Portal could hold from 65355 to 150000. We found in doing so that existing static-list-channel-selection methods struggled and were difficult to use when there were hundred(s) of thousands of channels in the Data Portal. This is why the channel selection controls in VIEW, ANALYSIS and REPORT were all replaced with comparable controls that supported both drag&drop and a new type-ahead auto-filtered list. In the process, the Data Portal had to be replaced with one that relied less on static population in memory and more on dynamic fetching. R&D did NOT make the determination that channel pinning was a useless feature, rather R&D determined that supporting hundred(s) of thousands of channels in the Data Portal was higher priority.
I very much hope that channel pinning can be (re-)implemented very soon.
Walter Rick wrote "Please, can you explain what your workflow is that it makes “pinning” necessary for you?"
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Hi,
so heres my workflow, i filter channel for example *HEAD*ACR*, i find the channel and pin it. after directly i search *NECK*FOZ* and i pin the neck channel and i still see the head channel which i would not see if the pinning function would be gone. like this i can pin 3 channels from different location ande have them next to each other, ready to work with them in analysis panel.
I find this pinning very usefull and users using my program written in Diadem are using the pinning really lot, so they will be surprised and not so happy that this function is gone, and if i tell them that its because of possibility to have 100,000 channels loaded, they wont believe me that the developers changed this feature for that one they will never use 😄
Pinning is also really useful for us when we want to keep an x-channel "visible" when searching for y-channels to plot in VIEW and REPORT. We use it all the time for "sparse" data that isn't able to be converted into a waveform directly.
Brad Turpin wrote: R&D did NOT make the determination that channel pinning was a useless feature, rather R&D determined that supporting hundred(s) of thousands of channels in the Data Portal was higher priority.
I very much hope that channel pinning can be (re-)implemented very soon.
Good to hear, and I agree with the priority assessment. I hope it makes its way back into DIAdem soon too!
I agree with all of the above. For the user case, I most often use pinning when I have large numbers of channels in the Data Portal, to help me keep track of same-named channels in different groups, or pinning the x-channel for easy access.
With DIAdem 2019 SP1 the PINNS are back.
Thank you and greetings
Walter