Adjust Pane Origin for Block Diagram

[McQuillan]

Hi Team,

A really small thing (and cosmetic...), but could you enable 'Adjust Pane Origin' for the block diagram, please? Since LabVIEW 19, there's an option to adjust the pane origin on the FP (Edit > Adjust Pane Origin) 

I would like the option to do that on the BD too as I like having BD dots on, but the origin looks out of place (unless I manually move the BD).

[AristosQueue (NI)]

LabVIEW 20xx is not doing any further work to support use of the block diagram alignment grid. Without the grid in play, there really isn't much knowledge of where the diagram origin is located, and even for scripting, knowing that origin is less important than the FP origin. The diagram grid is one of those rarely used features that we do not see sufficient return on investment for working on.

[Zafer.Depe]

I wonder the reason of negative coordinates for block diagram. Why we don't have only positive coordinates?

[Darren]

If you press Ctrl-Space, Ctrl-O on the diagram, it will scroll the diagram to have the origin in the top-left corner. You can then Ctrl-A to select all on your diagram and move everything to be in a good position relative to the origin.

In LabVIEW 2019 and later, you can also press Ctrl-Space, Ctrl-F on the diagram. This will not only take care of scrolling and repositioning the diagram items, but will also resize the diagram window to fit the diagram contents.

Based on AristosQueue's comment above, and the workarounds I've listed here, I'm going to decline this idea.

[Darren]

Declined for reasons listed in ArisosQueue's reply, and the fact that multiple workarounds exist (listed in my reply).

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Why we don't have only positive coordinates?

So you can drop nodes in any direction without having to worry about where the edges of the diagrams are. Are you asking why we don't reposition the diagram after every edit so that the upper-left node is always at (0,0)? Because until about 10 years ago, that would have been an extremely expensive edit operation.

[Zafer.Depe]

I see the point to have the flexibility to move block diagram at any direction. But this encourages beginners to write one VI applications with huge scrolls.

I always reposition my bd to the origin and keep the bd size strictly at some limits. There is no scrolling or just a little vertical with mouse wheel.

I wish to have an option to limit my bd size like a worksheet with left upper corner is fixed to origin.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Zafer: LabVIEW NXG has actually gone a very different direction. It's an interesting experiment... the new platform has zoom for the block diagram. There was concern that this would create gigantic VIs... and that concern has proven well founded. BUT... interestingly... these giant VIs are not necessarily bad code. If the diagram has well-organized regions, zooming in on any one region allows for very concentrated work on one small piece of functionality in isolation from the others. I find it surprisingly pleasant to navigate these giant diagrams -- I think it has something to do with the fixed "map" relationships that the graphics maintain... like exploring a map of the world as a single map instead of a separate map for each country that are only connected at the connector panes.

It's a very different way of working than traditional LabVIEW programming. I am looking forward to seeing how code evolves in that model.

[Zafer.Depe]

What about load times and block diagram redraw performance? When i press a button, drop anything or move some structures on diagram i want it to respond immediately. It is really a headache when you see the busy icon at block diagram each time you do something.

[wiebe@CARYA]

The workarounds is really a lot of work... Still stuck in LV18, so I do "QD - ctrl+O, ctrl+A, shift+arrows" often for FPs.

Perhaps QD - CTRL+SHIFT+O should set the origin to the top left (as it does now), and move all diagram content there?

So, CTRL+SHIFT+O does the same as Adjust Pane Origin, but also for the BD?

We could add that ourselves if we wanted it...

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> What about load times and block diagram redraw performance?

LabVIEW NXG is a young product with many things yet to be built or optimized, but those two are fine. It can load even very large VIs extremely fast and with all of its modern graphics architecture, it can re-render smoothly as you move around, zooming in and zooming out. (The slow load overhead of NXG that some of you may have experienced in 2019 timeframe is from loading the environment itself and the project load, both of which have been significantly reduced in recent builds. The NXG developers are really coming along in polishing that environment.) A modern graphics layer is one of the big reasons that we created NXG to replace 20xx.