LabVIEW Idea Exchange

In general I would like to see LabVIEW more in line with the OS GUI standards. We have dialog controls and colors, however they are not set up to be the default choice - and we lack other GUI elements like status bars, notify icons, child windows etc. etc. A large part of LV-programmers' time is spent on ways to get LV to mimic what users will recognise and therefor intuitively understand.

In this case I simply miss the "sort glyph" that indicates that a table or listbox is sorted based on a given column and in which direction.

I imagine we could show or hide this and set its direction with a property node...It would not handle the sorting (although that would have been neat as well - if you had an in-built sorting that just needed to know a few parameters about the column data to do the job)...

Often, when modifying code, I need to reduce the size of a structure due to removing code.  If I have a nested structure system (e.g. event structure in a case statement in a loop), this can get very tedious.  It would be nice to have a "shrinkwrap structure" functionality on the right-click menu as a counterpoint to the autogrow.  This would be an action that would reduce the structure size to something a bit bigger than the largest contents.  An option to set how much extra space to include would be nice.

As the number of classes in a project increases it gets harder and  harder to figure out which methods in a class are overridden because you need to scroll up and down to compare the methods listed under each class. A distinctive glyph or icon in the project explorer window would be very helpful. I understand that there are workarounds like creating an override virtual folder and moving the overridden vis inside it or right clicking the class and opening the "VI for Override" window and checking if the vi is listed. However, a distinctive icon would drastically increase code readability.

LabVIEW  has a somewhat hidden feature built into the variant attributes functionality that easily allows the implementation of high performance associative arrays. As discussed elsewhere, it is implemented as a red-black tree.

I wonder if this functionality could be exposed with a more intuitive set of tools that does not require dummy variants and somewhat obscure VIs hidden deeply in the variant palette (who would ever look there!).

Also, the key is currently restricted to strings (Of course we can flatten anything to strings to make a "name" for a more generalized use of all this).

I imagine a set of associative array tools:

• Create associative array (key datatype, element datatype)
• insert key/element pair (replace if key exists)
• lookup key (index key) to get element
• read all keys
• delete key/element
• delete all keys/elements
• dump associative array to disk
• restore associative array from disk
• destroy associative array
• ... (I probably forgot a few more)

One of my pet peeves when using the Unbundle or Bundle by Name occurs when I remove or add an item from a cluster and LabVIEW attempts to find the item with a similiar name.  The behavior should always break when the specific item in the Unbundle/Bundle by name is removed.

More often than not LabVIEW picks the wrong thing and introduces programming bugs. 

Picture says it all.

I am not allergic to Kudos, in fact I love Kudos.

 Make your LabVIEW experience more CONVENIENT.

Similar to the library banner functionality, I find myself wanting to replace the icon of method overrides with the icon in the parent. This is done automatically for new overrides, but I haven't seen any way to apply a new parent method icon to its overrides once they exist already.

I imagine this working like the library banner: whenever the VI icon of a dynamic dispatch VI with overrides in memory is changed a dialog could pop up and ask if you want to apply it to the children as if the icon had been freshly generated the way it is for new overrides.