Imagine that I have a UI with dozens of graphs all showing acquired time history data. Time could be on the X axis, but it could also be on the Y axis depending on the convention of the UI. The user wants to see what happened between 1 minute ago and 2 minutes ago. The user needs to look at data on various graphs to make a determination. The user wants to go to one plot and make a zoom operation on the time scale and have all other plots show the same time scale interval.
Why not have a properties tab on plots that allows the developer to define a named linked scale and assign a scale on the current graph to link to the global scale. So the developer can drop XY graphs and set the time scale to link to create a standard time scale common between plots. When the user changes the time scale on one linked plot, it automatically propagates to all other linked plots. The common scales would be global across any VIs in memory.
This would be useful for linking time scales, but I also see it as potentially useful for linking other scales, say the Y scale is temp and the user wants all temp plots to match scale. This would be harder though as some negotiation would be needed if autoscale is turned on where where all plots would have to report their min/max to a process that would then pass out updated scale ranges as some reasonable interval (1 hz, 10 hz, etc).
All of the above can be managed with resize events and programmatic handling of those events, but I waste many dev hours on that task. I'd love for this to be an out of box feature.
