NO MORE BROKEN WIRES!

[laskar01]

Hi all !

I am a beginner in Labview.

What is the most timeconsuming obstacle using Labview? You know what you want to do, but it feels that Labview forces you to go big circles around it?

BROKEN WIRES!

You want to connect, but you cannot. Labview wants you to: array it up, de-array, bundel, unbundel, get a waveform component here and smack it together with a sampling rate there. And you go

CRAZY!!!!

Simple solution:

Wire is broken. Rightclick on the x, and choose some legit suggestion.

I am not a programmer, but couldn't this annoying thing be solved implementing a simple lookup-table in the Labview intrepreter? There are not much different datatypes, and dealing with aggregated datatypes like clusters of different sorts could be dealt with some sort of pattern matching scheme. In a recursive language like Haskell patternmatching is done "quite easy".

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Wire is broken. Rightclick on the x, and choose some legit suggestion.

Many of these already exist. Right click on a broken wire that is a scalar wire connected to an array terminal... you'll see an easy option for "Insert Buid Array." Sometimes there will be an option to disable indexing on upstream tunnel. There are many others. However, it is fairly limited the cases where we can judge what you want to do. We might have added more over time, but when we ask customers, no one ever reports using the ones that we do have. Given that, it didn't seem like much of a value add to spend time doing this.

[laskar01]

Well, I am talking from a beginners perspective. You won't have these answers from a seasoned Labview-programmer.

The question is do you want to make Labview more easy accessible to non-programmers, or is your focus on people who already can program i Labview?

From a business perspective it is more beneficial for you if you can make Labview even more accessible.

Kindest regards,

Lasse

[TCPlomp]

You could install the 'Insert Type Conversion' plugin by Francois Normandin that includes the following conversions:

- Decimal String to Number.
- Float String to Number.
- Any numeric type (int, unint, floats, complex) to any numeric type.
- Variant to string or numerics.
- Numerics to Variant.
- String to Variant.
- Path to String.
- String to Path.
- Boolean to string.
- Enum to String.
- String to Enum.
- Numeric to Enum.
- Numeric to String
- Unbundle cluster to terminal indicator.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Well, I am talking from a beginners perspective. You won't

> have these answers from a seasoned Labview-programmer.

It doesn't matter whether you're a new user or an experienced user... both user types do not seem to find these useful. New users do not trip over these options, although they do exist. It just doesn't seem to be an intuitive place to look for "how do I fix this wire?"  Experienced users do not use them because either they drop the necessary conversion nodes before they even start wiring or because they have other shortcuts for fixing the broken wires.

If this idea gets lots of kudos, I'm happy to push ahead, but when we added the ones for the bulk of the common cases, we just didn't see much usage.

The core of your idea -- make it easier to figure out how to repair broken wires -- likely has merit. It's just this particular implementation suggestion that I'm suggesting has been tried and found wanting.

[Darren]

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