LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Currently, it's a crapshoot when you drag an ant trail selection box around items on your FP or BD. It's truly an art to become good at selecting objects in LabVIEW - we all learn "hot spots" to place our selection rectangles, and we all heavily rely on the "Shift+Click" method of adding or removing objects from our selection. Below is an example of what actually might be selected when dragging a selection box:

All horizontal wires were selected down to "ABCDEF", even though just a very small portion of the visible wire was inside the selection box. It's not intuitive to try to not select wire that is hidden behind the Unbundle.

I propose a method that mimics selection in some graphics editing and CAD programs: the idea of "Enclosed" and "Inclusive" selections. An Enclosed selection is made by dragging the mouse from L to R. This operation selects only the objects THAT ARE COMPLETELY ENCLOSED by the selection box, ignoring objects that are partially outside the selection (the red arrow is not part of the BD, it merely represents the motion of the cursor):

Alternatively, if you drag your mouse from RIGHT to LEFT for a selection box, you select every single object that is fully or even partially contained within the selection box:

Voila! Selection is now a TAUGHT SCIENCE instead of a LEARNED ART!

Hi guys,

I'm missing some very fast way how to create cluster out of selection. It could be done as it is shown here:

I think since LV developers became familiar with Every GUI Programmer's Dream they are ready for the next step...

Many of us using graphical programming for scientific applications, where we dealing with numbers, measurements, etc.

How often we grab to Windows Calculator to compute simple equations?

What about ability to enter something like 3,75*2,8 into any constant or control (in principle everywhere where we can put numbers) and then get computation result in this place:

In the past I've worked in desktop publishing industry and using the software called "Macromedia Freehand MX", and that was really "killer feature", which saves huge amount of time.

This is how it works:

Or for example, 5 rotated copies:

Even in Color mixer simple computations are allowed:

Everywhere where I can put some numbers, in any dialog:

So, my suggestion to have the same in every numeric control or constant.

This is what I mean:

So, it should be allowed to enter here something like "3*5" or "42+3*5" 

As MVP suggested to have the only (at least) base operations *, /, +, -, also combined as shown above, but may be "advanced" support (like fully offered by Formula String) is also not so bad, why not:

Anyway it should work everywhere, including constants on the Block Diagrams:

Also, for example, on Resize Objects Dialog:

Or even in the Settings (in general everywhere for any numeric field across whole LabVIEW):

And also in Run-Time, of course, not only in Development Environment.

If you think that "always enabled" feature will be annoying, then I can suggest to make this optionally per Control/Constant Option:

Or may be as global setting in the Options.

Currently if you right click on a subVI from the block diagram and choose properties, it brings up the Object Properties dialog.  The only options you can change there are label options, which can easily be changed in the "Visible Items" submenu.  I can't think of one time when this has ever been what I wanted out of this action.  Instead, I think this action should open up the VI Properties Window for the VI.  

Notes

• Replacing a node via Right-click >> Replace >> selecting item from palette results in the same outcome as replacing via QuickDrop. This idea should apply to both replacement methods.
• Replacing a VI via either QuickDrop or right-click behaves correctly. The new VI label is visible only if the old VI's label was visible. In effect, the new VI retains the "Label >> Visible" setting of the VI that was replaced, which is desirable.
• This idea is somewhat related to the following idea: "Show node names when dropped" option

The size of the Close Reference VI makes it impossible to draw a proper block diagram.

It is too big!  It does not match with the Property Node vi.

Therefore I would propose: --> Make the Close Reference VI smaller!

Preamble:

Just following up on a sub-idea raised within this recent idea from tst: LabVIEW should break VIs which have hidden code.  I *almost* like tst's idea, but IMO it is a bit too heavy-handed:

• YES, I want better information when there is hidden code on my diagram, but...
• NO, I don't want my code to break!

The Idea:

If a structure hides code beyound it's boundary, then provide a visual indication. For example, the edge of the structure could be coloured red to alert the user that something unexpected is going on.

It's not uncommon to accidentally leave a process hanging and to have a really hard time tracking it down.  Different folks seem to have made different "kill all VI" tools, but this should be a native LabVIEW feature supported by NI.  The tool should just work.  "Ctrl+." doesn't always work.  You should be able to push some shortcut that works even if you have a frozen modal dialog or whatever, and all running VIs are stopped, and log of which ones were stopped prints to the screen.