Selectable and configurable "icon" view tab added to Project Explorer

[PatrickLye]

Add a selectable and configurable "icon" view tab to the Project Explorer. Each view can be customized for fast access to whatever portion of the project you are working on at the time, and a different configured view can be selected with the drop down selector.

It would be nice to have more selection on the icons, but the existing icons with name strings from the items tab could also be used. These icons would be in place of the buttons in the following images:

Then with a simple drop down selection you would have fast access to the next items you configure for that view:

etc... etc... etc...

The view should have a setting to autosize like clusters on the Front Panel so there isn't a bunch of screen dead space unless the user turns this off. For those of us with multiple monitors we could be editing what we want very rapidly by a drop down selection, a quick sort through the pertinent items for that portion of the project, and a click on the icon.

The views should have a setting to close all VIs when selecting another view to keep from having a huge numbers of Vis that are not being edited open in the background. This setting should be per view. It is possible someone would have more than one view that tie together on larger projects to edit sub-sections of that portion of the project.

[X.]

You are essentially talking about tags for objects in the Project, so that different objects can be accessed at once by refering to their tags, which would be a bit more flexible that the current virtual folders. You can put a VI is single virtual folder, but you could tag a VI with different labels (main, module 1).

I am not sure I see the advantage of the icon view, but I can see a use for tags, which you could associate with more than just VIs (or LV objects for that matter). Think DLLs, other files, icons, etc.

[Intaris]

Kudos for X's version.  I was just thinking the same thing.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Isn't this what we achieved by adding the # bookmarks?

[X.]

@AQ: no. The purpose here is to have a quick access in the Project Explorer window to VIs (or other files) that could be dragged to some other places (BD, FP). The bookmark manager is a different beast. You can't bookmark a VI, just a location in a VI. And that doesn't allow to pick up the corresponding VI and drop it somewhere else, AFAIK.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Ah. I see. I don't think I'd ever use the feature, but I can see the utility of it.

[X.]

I am not sure I would be using this much at first, but I can imagine getting addicted to it over time.

This being said, I'd rather have other features of the PE fixed first (e.g. Hovering over a Virtual Folder during Drag and Drop).

The bookmark idea was already posted BTW: Bookmarks in Project Explorer

[PatrickLye]

@x

I think the icons would be a big asset. Think how nice it is to use icons in the OS and on the Block Diagram. Typically it easier to key into an icon than read through a text list of item names. It should be a pretty simple thing to have the icons we build up for the VI to show up in these windows.

This really isn't a bookmark system. It is more of a specialized and configurable folder system for access to anything in the project window.

I think the key lies in the ability to easily pick through a few configured items for a section of the project and open it rapidly for editing. Then when you move on to another section, by selecting an enum,of code you can rapidly pick through a small list and start programming.

This really isn't a bookmark in the project explorer. Like you said above this is direct access to the actual objects for dragging and dropping, name changes, opening, etc...

Unlike the Bookmark Manager this would even allow you to open running Vis/objects.

I can easily picture this saving a great deal of time just finding the right thing and applying that time to outputting code. I go from module to module on a regular basis throughout a day, and I spend way too much time closing up a sequence of Vis and then gradually opening another sequence of Vis.

Another improvement for this would be to have an open all button that could open every item in the window and put them right back to the place that you saved tham at in order to start coding instead of trying to move windows around to get to what is needed..

This would also save time looking through too many open Vis popping up when you hover over the dock icon.

[tst]

My initial thought was that you're basically describing a BD - it has a bunch of icons which you put where you want for different VIs. If I understand correctly, the main difference here is that you want something which will give you scope and context management, so you can say "now I'm working on this component and so these are the VIs that I want to see".

If that's the case, I think you can get pretty close to there yourself by writing such a tool today. It would have a ring and some utility buttons on the top and a subpanel as its main body. In the subpanel, you show the BD of a VI which you select in the ring and that BD is the tool you use for opening/dragging/etc. You could then use the utility buttons to open/close all the subVIs of that VI and perform other relevant operations.

A practical way to save this config is probably in a separate file which sits next to the lvproj file and gets the same name and you can probably also avoid having to save the container VIs separately by using methods (possibly private) which let you load and save VIs as binary streams (or simply save them as temp files and then dump the content of the temp file into your config file).

Does this sound like something which would cover your use case reasonably well?

[Darren]

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