Option for compact data type description in Context Help

[raphschru]

Often when I want to look at the structure of a complex data type containing nested typedefs, I find the data type description in the Context Help quite heavy/verbose.

For example, could you tell at first glance how many levels of hierarchy there are in this data structure ?

Well, actually there are 5 levels (including the root cluster), but this is obfuscated by the unnecessary levels added by typedefs.

The description could be much more concise:

Here is an alternative that keeps the typedef type descriptions and appends them after the typedef name. However I'm not sure about this one because it could create description texts that are too long to be displayed in a single line:

Also for the configuration, it could be an option in "Options > Environment" and/or a button in the Context Help:

What are your thoughts ?

Raphaël.

[GregSands]

Sounds good, except instead of an extra button, it should be in LabVIEW.ini.

[fefepeto_kb]

I think I would prefer this to be dynamical, like HTML elements where you can expand the elements one by one. But, that would likely require the context help to be an HTML document, which would then become inconvenient.

The middle way might be a markdown flavor. But that would again add some complexity to the context help, and probably slow down the processing of large data types.

[BertMcMahan]

I'd love a way to make those lists smaller. Classes (especially those using the Actor Framework hierarchy) get really big, really fast.

I don't like your second image, though. As-read, it says that "Channels" is a typedef containing a 1D array, when in reality Channels is a typedef that contains a cluster that contains a 1D array. The view is smaller, but it's factually incorrect. It also indicates that this cluster contains exactly one element, the 1D array.

The first image also tells me that "Channel" contains 6 elements, which can be helpful in trying to determine exactly how many items are within the Channel item.

Perhaps a better way would be to add lines, similar to a Tree control. Heck... why not just make the display a tree control? Then I can suppress all of the stuff I don't care about.

Alternatively, the "condensed view" could abbreviate lots of the really long names and suppress the "Range" part of the display. For example:

TypeName (typedef 'ChannelClass.ctl'[non-strict]) (unsigned word [16-bit integer (0 to 65535)' enum ())

could become

TypeName ('ChannelClass.ctl' [NS TD] U16 enum)

"NS TD" means "Non-strict typedef". Most people know what U16 means, so we don't need to repeat the range every single time. This gives you all of the information in less than half of the number of characters. Granted, abbreviations could be hard to translate to other languages easily, so that might not be the best approach. Maybe you could make a new icon for "non-strict typedef" and "strict typedef"? There's already an icon showing the class. Maybe add the little black triangle to that icon? Or next to it?

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Sounds good, except instead of an extra button, it should be in LabVIEW.ini.

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I'd prefer it be a button, especially when information gets hidden when it's enabled. Using my example above, 99% of the time I don't care about ranges for a datatype (since I know them already), but I'll admit I can't recall the resolution/range differences between a Float and a Double off the top of my head. For those cases I'd like to have the button that toggles "verbose" mode.

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that would likely require the context help to be an HTML document

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Making the context help more dynamic would be great. Imagine being able to click on the TypeDef and open it up from the context help, or if you could hover over the name and get more info (like showing the range of an unsigned word). Custom "help" windows similar to custom probes would be pretty slick.