Allow Same Quick Drop Short Cuts...

[DanielMurmann]

It would be very useful if we could have same QuickDrop PlugIn with the same shortcut depending of the selection object that we have made in "Block Diagram" or in "Front Panel".

For example:

- Imagine "Ctrl+C" short cut, this would be useful for lots of QuickDrops that comes to my mind.

• Copying to clipboard a bundle by name text.
• Copying to clipboard a unbundle by name text
• Copying to clipboard a selected case.
• etc....

[tst]

There's no reason in principle you can't do that today - you have access to the SelectionList[] property inside the plugin VI, so you can use that to see which objects were selected and act accordingly.

Of course, I'm guessing that what you actually want is a more generic redirection mechanism which would decide which of the plugins to call based on the selection. This seems to be similar to what the JKI right-click framework had, where each plugin actually had two parts - the action itself and an evaluation VI. The evaluation VI for every plugin you had installed would be called after you right clicked and would return the relevant menu strings based on the conditions you defined. That meant that the right click menu only showed actions which were relevant to the actual selection you made. This was very convenient, but it doesn't really match the way QD works today and it would get slower the more plugins you had installed. I know that many QD users are concerned about speed and would want a way of being sure that this won't slow them down.

I think that in general QDKS have a serious accessiblity problem and I did post another idea which should help with that - http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Supercharge-Quick-Drop-Turn-QD-keyboard-shortcuts-into...

That idea won't help with what you want directly, but it does relieve some of the problem and it does open the way to making this idea more practical in that it separates the actions from their shortcuts, allowing you in principle to more easily add such a redirection layer.

P.S. You can probably also create a full redirection layer yourself today by pointing all the shortcuts to a specific VI which will run the relevant code.

P.P.S. I do actually kind of like this idea. My main problem with is that it can cause confusion for the users, because you might select something and not be aware that more than one plugin can act on it. Presumably the system will run the first plugin that matches its selection criteria. The RCF didn't have this problem because it would give you a menu option for every plugin that matched and you had to select a specific plugin yourself. I suppose you could do something similar (show a selection dialog if there's more than one match), but I'm not sure how much QD users who are concerned about speed would be happy with that.

[DanielMurmann]

Thanks for your feedback. The "http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Supercharge-Quick-Drop-Turn-QD-keyboard-shortcuts-into... seems to be a great change and I guess that with that I will be close to get what I want. Regards, D.

[tst]

If you like that idea you should vote for it (and get others to do so too) - that's one of the mechanisms that NI uses to decide which ideas to implement and is the only one we can affect directly.

[DanielMurmann]

Thats done!!!!!

[Darren]

Any idea that has not received any kudos within a year after posting will be automatically declined. 

[tst]

It can also be pointed out that LV 2015 has the ability to add plugins to the right click menus, and these plugins do look at the actual items to decide which items to add to the menu.