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Please let me opt out from this new feature, introduced in LabVIEW 2017, permanently in the setup dialog.

Using LabVIEW for a very long time (since LabVIEW 2.0), I never wished such a feature (it got only 27 Kudoes) - and - I am even using it's "anti feature", implemented up to now, constructively to detach objects (Pull control into a structure, connect it to the new target - and "Ctrl B").

This new feature, forced onto everybody, would be less annoying, if pressing "W" would reliably disable the feature. However, at least in vritual windows machines (Parallels) on a Mac, it does not work 50% of the time.

Smart Bundle\Unbundle nodes

Many programming languages IDE are able to distinguish the cluster level. However, selecting a cluster element in LabVIEW requires covering the full path from the top cluster until the desired element. The consumed time for this actions is directly proportional to the cluster size. It would be great that the bundle\unbundle nodes distinguish the cluster level in LabVIEW to speed up the cluster item selection.

Currently, a selection of an item requires a full navigation:

With the improvement a selection would only require partial navigation:

Probes are so useful for debugging, but monitoring them within the Probe Watch window can be a headache. I constantly find myself focusing back and fourth between Probe Watch and the code to translate a probe number to a position in the code. A solution would be to have the probe's value float just above the probe itself. LabVIEW already has a similar feature. When you use Highligh Execution wire paths display their current vaules, but using Highlight Execution is too slow and no practical for every debug situation.

Here is the issue as it stands today:

Here is my proposed new feature! :

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CTRL+Click on an input is a great little tool to switch the input.

However, it only works when both inputs are wired. Often (, I or QD connected a wire wrong,) I feel like switching the input, before wire-ing the 2nd. Only to find it doesn't work...

Having to connect the 2nd wire just seems to disrupt the flow, being focused on the first input. Being forced to make things worse (connect two wrong wires) before being able to make it right just feels itchy to me.

Switch one wire.png

It's a minor thing, but I never understood why it would be limited to 2 wires.

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The getting started windows fills with irrelevant entries if we open many VIs and projects from the forum. We probably never want to see them again. Also, if items exist that have the same name, but reside in different folders, they will show with the full (often very long!) path and the filename is not directly visible unless we e.g. hover over it or make the window gigantic. Here we want to remove the stale one, even if a copy still exists on disk.

We can currently do some cleanup by editing labview.ini but it is tedious. (just try it!)

I would like to request a feature that allows us to easily and permanently remove any entry in the list.
(...maybe it could even show for pinned entries?)

IDEA: I suggest to show a special glyph that, when clicked would remove that entry from the list.

It could also be e.g. an "X" (or similar) that shows next to the pin when hovering so we can either pin or thrash an entry.

These are just some suggestions, but there should be a way to easily weed out unwanted entries from the GSW. Of course the actual files will not be touched. We would just go back to the state before we opened that item.

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Boolean case improvement

So, i just changed a case from a string input to a boolean input. Ofcourse it gets broken with a red "1" in the case selector. That's logical.

Now i need to select the case selector and write False, then switch to the other and write True ...

Once both cases are correct i can r-click and switch them with a "Make this case False".

Improvement suggestion:

If having a boolean input, the Make this case True/False should be active for all cases always.

Even if you have multiple cases (it'll still be broken and you'll have to clear the extra cases)

When programming with large applications, often times you'll have clusters carrying a lot of information. If you hover over the cluster wire and observe Context Help, you might see something like this:

This Context Help window above is rather large and doesn't necessarily make it any easier to see the structure or contents of the cluster. My proposed idea calls for the ability to expand or collapse the cluster contents within the Context Help window, such as this:

What do you think?

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NI's response to the ideas thus far appears far too sporadic. For example if you check out the top LabVIEW ideas (http://forums.ni.com/t5/ideas/v2/ideaexchangepage/blog-id/labviewideas/tab/most-kudoed) 7 of the top 10 ideas are still listed as new! Adding insult to injury the average age of these ideas to date is 1,017 days! It is ok to decline ideas but please provide us some indication that this is something you take seriously. It would appear that NI is cherry picking the easiest half dozen or so items from the list so you have a marketing gimmick to list on the LabVIEW release notes. I propose that a threshold is set and made public so that if an idea reaches a certain amount of kudos, R&D must address it, even if that means declining it.

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Space constant redesign

Currently, the space constant looks very similar to an underline character, possibly causing confusion.

I think the icon could be made a bit more distinctive. Here are some alternatives I just made up. I would probably prefer (1) but I am open to any other suggestions. 😄

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With a case structure I can place the mouse cursor over the structure and Ctrl + scroll wheel to cycle through the cases without it being active. If I try doing this on arrays it doesn't work.

For front panel arrays the numeric indicator must have focus for this to work. Doesn't work when the array data is selected. I understand that multidimensional arrays would be a problem, but for 1D arrays it would be nice if it cycled through the elements.

For array constant block diagram elements, no scroll action works regardless of what is active. Again it should allow the user to cycle through elements for 1D arrays simply by hovering over the item and Ctrl + scroll wheel.

Not a duplicate of http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Array-scrollbar-quot-scrollable-quot-with-scroll-wheel/idi-p/1009220

[admin edit: Adding animation image at the request of the OP]

Hello,

I'm telling my strudents how they should use the error cluster and how important it is. In subvis no error dialogs should be shown and so on (see topics of LabVIEW Core 1 / Core 2).

But many VIs written by NI have been programmed very sloppy.

Example: VI "Write into spreadsheet file". The error cluster is not wired to the inputs/outputs and if an error occures, an error dialog would pop up. Here is the block diagram of your V "Write into spreadsheet file"I:

Please check all of your VIs and do a revision that we can make well-coded applications where the error handling will work correctly.

Regards

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Some very useful properties for UI manipulation on graphs and charts do not exist. This makes it impossible to make very dynamic UI's with variable number of plots or dynamic resizing in panels.

It is possible to set Legend.number of plots and Legend position. It is not possible to set:

Graph palette, scale legend or cursor legend position. This makes resizing graphs very limiting.

Further, it is possible to programmatically create a custom legend. However it is not possible with cursors because there is no property available to get the current cursor values. Please can we have cursor.values[] and cursor.legend.number of rows

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I very commonly use the Ctrl-Drag shortcut across empty block diagram space to create new space on the diagram. When I do this, it is almost ALWAYS intended to just create space in one dimension, horizontally or vertically. If you dare try to create space in both directions at once, this invariably disrupts the arrangement of the diagram. You end up with objects that were nicely aligned being a few pixels off, or worse.

To create space in one direction, I have to very carefully make sure when I Ctrl-Drag that I stay exactly in a straight line, making the process tedious and error-prone. I often have to undo the operation and start over because I'm one pixel off. (One pixel is a lot in LabVIEW!)

It would be very very beneficial to have a similar shortcut that only operates in one direction, or to be able to specify in Tools>>Options to modify the existing behavior, because the default is never what I want.

Currently, for waveform/XY plots/graphs, the legend, graph palette, cursor window, etc are all "coupled" with the graph itself from a "graphical" perspective.

This means that all of these "addons" must be attached to the graph, and you can't put them in a different part of the panel. Screen resizing thus tends to screw things up, especially if your plot names can be defined by the user.

I'd like to decouple these somehow.

For example, I'd like to be able to put my legend and zoom tools in separate panes separated by splitter bars, or even in a right-click style menu (like a subpanel popping up). This feature would let you use automatic resizing on the plot itself and keep the legend separate.

You could theoretically program your own version of this, but:

-Recreating the legend functionality (line size/width/etc) would be a large undertaking, especially since there isn't a native Datagrid type control that could display a checkbox, string, and small image.

-I don't know of a way to get at the built-in zoom/pan tools programmatically (yes, you could create your own, but it's a big PITA)

-It wouldn't work at edit time, like the current features do, unless you baked all of it into an Xcontrol

Basically yes, you COULD get a lot of this done yourself... but it'd be nice to just use the tools NI already made, which work great. I don't want to reinvent the wheel just for some graphical convenience.

One of the things that sometimes bugs me when using LabVIEW is that if you have a front panel or block diagram in a small window, many of the menu options and toolbar options are inaccessible without having to resize the window first. You have to have a minimum window size to be able to access all of the toolbar functions.

Still don't get it?

This is how big I want my SubVI window to be:

Problems with the above:

A lot of the toolbar buttons and menu options are completely inaccessible
I'm sure it was for good reason (probably some other icons that appear there), but there's also a load of empty space to the left of the run button which would allow me to fit more of the toolbar on screen

To be able to access the entire toolbar, the windows has to be at least one of the following wide:

Why is this a problem?

Normally my front panel windows are nicely sized according to the controls and indicators on the front panel (e.g. controls top left, indicators top right, error clusters bottom), for most SubVIs this usually means that the window is thinner than the minimum width to show all of the toolbar options.
If you have a fixed size UI panel (e.g. for dialogues) - if you want to align / space objects on the panel you have to make it larger, do the scaling and then resize back to the original size which isn't ideal (possibility for not resizing to the original size correctly)
Similar to the above but if you have a UI where you have fit/scale to pane you might want the initial size of the UI to be smaller than the minimum width

Existing workarounds:

Just before submitting this idea I realised you can shrink the 'search' bar from the toolbar to make it slightly better
Use the OpenG (?) VI for 'fit to largest decoration - this is OK for some UIs but not really suitable for the SubVI case above

Proposed solution:

Please make it so that the menu and toolbar are accessible regardless of window size. One solution would be to have a button that allows you to 'scroll' the toolbar or have a pop-up dialogue that shows the missing toolbar buttons as per the image below.

MS Paint skills (icon lifted from Chrome's bookmarks bar):

As an aside, MS Word manages it fairly well (even though it isn't that readable), and it has a LOT of toolbar buttons:

Please consider my idea (or Kudos it) for future versions of LabVIEW - it will improve usability of the IDE.

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(note: this idea is similar to this one, but different enough that I thought it warranted a new post)

LabVIEW 2019 will include a Clean Up Front Panel feature that repositions front panel objects to match their positions on the (already wired) connector pane. I think we should also consider implementing the opposite behavior, where you can arrange your front panel the way you want your connector pane, then assign that arrangement to the (currently empty) connector pane:

I envision the gesture used to employ this feature would be a Quick Drop Keyboard Shortcut, an entry in one of the drop-down menus, or a right-click on the Connector Pane.

LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Make numeric display format auto-set to what you input

Opt out permanently from "maintain wires connected"

Smart Bundle\Unbundle nodes

View probe values within the code during execution

Unbundle By Name: Element Autopopulation

Allow switching only one input wire (or: a more forgiving Scissor\Switch-A-Roo tool)

Let us easily cleanup the Getting Started Window (GSW)

Boolean case improvement

Expandable/Collapsible Clusters in Context Help

Allow References to be Wired into Case Selectors to Check for Validity

Require LabVIEW R&D response to any idea over N kudos

Space constant redesign

Ctrl + mouse wheel: Scroll through array elements when hovered over

Revision of many VIs written by NI (usage of the error cluster)

Waveform graph and chart manipulation new properties

Dynamic/smart Index/scrollbar on array constants

Create Space in One Direction Only

Decouple plot legend/tools/etc from the plot graphic itself

Make all toolbar buttons accessible regardless of window size

Make Connector Pane Match Front Panel Arrangement