Complex notes manager

[Edupo]

Hello, this is my first post in this forum and I don't found ideas about this topic. I hope you like it.

Well, time ago I started to work with LabVIEW, It's powerful, but there are some kind of issues that I want to explain here. Now I'm get involved in a big project for a very big aerospace company, and I'm developing a complex application to acquire some data and process it. Well, this software is in development by some people and I have an idea for the work flow.

I explain it with an example:

If we have in every VI a little data base with some notes ordered by type or something we can read the code or we can start to work in a VI faster. Imagine that you have an event structure with several cases, and you put some notes like you can see in the following image:

Now, I'm able to revise quickly the code reading all the notes and start working only in the "TO DO" zone. But let's do a more complex design: Now I open my project explorer, and open the "Note manager" that could be like this.

Here it is the real advantage of this tool: All the design are done and now I want to improve the application. Lets go only to the notes that interest to me: "TO DO" notes. If I double click on an element LabVIEW opens for me the VI centered in the zone that is interesting for me. And some more: I can check the work I've done and I can add new notes only with a click.

The more complex the project is, the more useful is this system. So, what do you think?

[PhillipBrooks]

There have been several ideas submitted regarding 'smart' comments and hypertext type links. Yours is interesting because it ties back the the project explorer.

The User Tags functionality might be sufficient to store the data inside the VI, so adding a database to the vi structure may not be neccessary.(vi.lib\UserTags folder)

[JackDunaway]

+1 for the different "types" of notes... TODO, WARNINGS, etc... This could be configurable, where the developer has the ability to define the color and title of new types of notes.

Here's a list of the "several ideas submitted regarding 'smart' comments and hypertext type links".

[kegghead]

Yes, this is one thing I miss very much when I'm in the LabVIEW IDE. Every time I go to MSVS or similar, I cry a little at how elegant this type of feature is for tracking to-do's, hacks, etc...

Many of my projects have spreadsheets that ride along side of them to track stuff like this, but by the end of the project they're terribly out of sync, and the inability to link the comment directly to the code is a real annoyance.

[Edupo]

I see your list Jack and I agree with all the ideas, if there is a mix this system can come very useful for develop more and more complex applications. In other environment like Visual Studio (as Kegghead said) this idea is a very smart and useful tool.

And I think that the project explorer is too simple now, there are a lot of possibilities.

If a tool goes a step ahead of the programmer it's considered, for me, a good tool.

I'm reading some posts and I think there is really good ideas here.

[falkpl]

This could also be very nice for requirements tracking (yes I know there is a requirements gateway).  I would prefer the catagories to be editable so we could add a feature like requirement to the list (todo, warning, notes, obsolete code, requirement ........). 

I do something similar with lables and the find feature already, that is to drom a lable with a header like:

<Todo>fix calc here

then I search (Find text) for <todo>, the interface you suggest is nicce since I can develope a labview utility for this very quickly.

Thanks for the idea.

[Thoric]

This could nicely tie in with the Requirements Gateway, allowing a form of feedback to the product specification. There are many occassions when a design spec results in code which the developer would wish to make comment, and by adding dynamic comments to the code which can be referenced back to the specific requirement, the Requirements Gateway can concatenate these and produce a form of interim reports that presents the comment alongside the associated specification.

It can also be used to determine progress of a project, perhaps, using the concept to To Do fields as markers for incomplete development.

I like it - Kudos.

[CM411]

Good idea, the comment functionality should be increased !

[crossrulz]

ChMa - if you like these ideas, give them Kudos.  NI R&D looks at the kudo count as a way to deciding which ideas to implement.  So leaving a comment saying "good idea" will do nothing.