Ok, here's my suggestion:
One minor annoyance with building pop-up subVIs is gracefully terminating the UI execution loop if the user closes the panel using the standard MS Windows "X" close button (upper right-hand corner of all standard Windows panels.)
Of course there are at least a couple of work-arounds -- disabling the Windows functionality completely, or polling to see if the panel is still open using a property node (and programmatically exiting the loop if it isn't). But I was thinking it would be nice if there was an option in the pop-up menu that forces a loop to terminate if the front panel window changes state from 'open' to 'closed'.
Alternatively, there could be a check-box option in the "Window Appearance" catagory of the "VI Properties" dialog that is something like this: "Auto-terminate loops when front panel closes".
It's nice to offer users the familar functionality of the standard OS close buttons, but it would also be nice if there was a simple way to do this, without the programming overhead. (I've enclosed this functionality inside a subVI and it's relatively easy to drop this in and wire it up. Presumably, it wouldn't be too much work to add this capability right into the loop structure itself.)
I realize that this leads to questions about what to do with parameters that are usually passed when the loop is terminated in the 'correct' way -- the whole question of "OK" versus "Cancel". Perhaps Windows itself has a an answer to this question, and that could be adapted into the LabVIEW environment.
Anyway, it would sure be nice if there was a way to enable the standard OS close boxes without incurring the minor annoyance of programmatically terminating an active (while) loop or UI state machine after-the-fact.
Anyone agree?
