Conditional Disable options for Front Panels of FPGA VIs

[Intaris]

Arising from similar requirements as I have posted many moons ago: HERE.... I naively thought putting a terminal in a disable structure would remove it from the FPGA compile. It doesn't.

Years later, I have developed a nice debug interface for my FPGA code which is becoming more and more modular as I refactor it.  I have many sub-modules with their own debug interfaces which can be turned on or off from the top-level VI via LVOOP method injection.

The problem is that I can't really compile my entire FPGA VI with ALL debug paths enabled as this just won't fit (It will sometimes compile, but most often not and our FPGA code base is still growing).  And this is before I even think about making my debug information more detailed.  I would like to be able to easily switch certain aspects of the debug interface on and off as testing requirements change.  On the debug interface level I can do this easily by simply not reading the data from the objects being used for the data transfer or simply passing in abstract methods which don't actually do anything and get optimised away.  But I'm left with a load of FP controls which are still eating up resources on the FPGA target. I don't want to delete the controls because that leads me to X copies of ever-so-slightly out-of-sync versions of my test VI which quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare.  Instead, I want to be able to "easily" reconfigure my test front-panel to only compile the stuff I'm currently actually interested in.

Part of what I would like is the ability to actually define areas of the FP which are enabled, disabled or enabled (and preferably also based on whether simulation is active or not - hence conditional disables for FP).  This way, when compiling, the FP elements will actually disappear and full resource savings can be made (as Xilinx is clever enough to optimise away any pointless code LV may stillhave instantiated in VHDL).  In addition, the ability to define certain controls as being enabled only when in simulation mode can allow us to have SGL graphs and so on present when needed during debugging.

So, would having conditional disable options for the FP (where controls are shown as greyed out when not available) be of interest to anyone?  If this would be an FPGA only thing, I wouldn't shed and tears.

Am I the only one who would use this? hmm. Maybe.