Recommend allowing that the information provided (in the context help window) for an unbroken line in the program be the same indication, whether or not the line is broken wherever possible.
If I understand you correctly, you want to see the datatype of the source if a wire is broken. This will only work if the brokeness is exclusively due to a mismatch at the data sink(s).
You can have a broken wire if the wire has multiple sources. What would you want to display in that case?
I would have to agree with "mismatch at the data sink(s) only." I would think most people do not connect two sources together, but rather connect to a mismatch.
If I had a string variable source called "Name1", and wired it to a numeric function (causing a broken line), I would expect to see "Name1" when I moved the cursor over the broken line. The program should be able to determine typical cases which originate from a single source. If the source point was deleted creating a destination originating from nowhere, then I could see a response like "source origin not available".
Bob
We already do this. You can see "abc" in the Context Help below when you are over the left half of the wire and "Numeric" when you are over the right half. What's missing that you want us to add?
If you hover over the left half of this wire, you see this:
Ah, the tip strip. Your original idea asked for more information in the Context Help window.
We deliberately don't put the full type information in the tip strip. We save full information for the Context Help window. Tip strips are meant to have very limited length to obscure as little of the diagram as possible while providing you with high priority information. The Context Help window stays in a fixed location on your screen and has more flexibility to grow in size and provide full details.
We do not display tip strips at all for unbroken wires. That would create flicker as your mouse moved across a diagram (which many people do as they're trying to track a wire through their code) or just idled in place, making it hard to read your diagram. In general, we try to avoid tip strips on the diagram as much as possible in favor of the Context Help window because they get in the way so easily. Tiny ones are ok, but not ones large enough to display full type info.
So, my question for you --
Why is the Context Help window not helping you? Why are you wanting to have all of this information replicated in the tip strip? I'm asking to better understand your workflow... even if this specific idea gets rejected, it may help us design systems better in the future that alleviate the problem through some other means.
Declined for reasons listed here: http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Broken-Line-Identification/idc-p/3190678#M32261