Better Property node support in quick drop

[Al.B]

Quick drop is fairly limited when dealing with .NET or activeX code (or any other property/invoke node heavy application), since there is no way to access anything but the property node itself. To improve this, I propose adding support for dot notation in quick drop to access properties.  My idea:

If nothing is selected, and the user begins typing the name of a class, offer the class as an option with [VI server] or something appended to it.  If the user types a "." after the class, populate the quick drop window with all of the properties and methods of that class.  For example:



If the user selects a property with subproperties, repopulate quick drop with all of the subproperties, for example :



Once the user reaches a property with a value or a method, quick drop would create the node with the selected property/method for you to drop:



The closest thing to this idea that I know of is the Ctrl+B shortcut which allows for changing the class, but I think that adding support for dot notation would make programming with property nodes much easier, and would also make it easier for .NET programmers to use LabVIEW.

[David_L]

I like the theory behind this idea, I just worry about the performance.  There are two implementations I can think of:

1.  Load All properties and methods for every possible class when the quick drop loads or at startup.  This will make the palette load time  take even longer than it already does, but would have a quick response on search (See my other idea concerning QD load time here)

2.  Load the properties and methods on the fly once a valid class is detected.  This seems like it might add significant overhead during typing since it has to constantly check for valid classes.  But maybe not, I don't know anything about the QD implementation under the hood.

If someone could find a way to implement this without slowing quick drop down, I'd think it would be a very awesome and useful idea.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Launch LabVIEW, create a new VI, and then hit ctrl+shift+B to launch the Class Browser. That loads all the properties and methods, and you'll see its response time is negligible. Quick Drop could just query that same back-end that the Class Browser uses... the nodes don't actually have to be in the palettes.

[tst]

I added a similar idea, but one which I think makes this much more usable, here - http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Add-Intellisense-support-to-the-property-node/idi-p/15...