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Swagger/OpenAPI  has become the default go to way to document and interact with rest API's.  It would be great that when you publish a LabVIEW webservice it generates the OpenAPI yml or json file (being able to generate both would be great).

 

Also having a right click in the lvproj webservice view that brings you to the swagger page for debugging would be helpful. 

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.

 

Searched briefly but couldn't find any ideas about this.

 

I know we have the ability #via_ignore comments to ignore specific tests for a specific VI, but I am looking at a different use case.

 

Here's the use case, I use DQMH. When you create a new DQMH module there is a lot of plumbing code that comes with it. It's standard stuff. Very rarely do I have to open or edit it. Much of it is scripting generated. It often fails tests but I don't care. In addition to failing, it takes up test time, which slows my feedback loop. I would a way to signal to VI analyzer to skip these files. I know I can use the VIAN API to limit the files it checks, but I was thinking there had to be a better way. 

 

Implementation Ideas - I had 2 main ideas

- Regex matching on VI names - with the regex pulled out of a text file somewhere ala gitignore. Many of the DQMH generated VIs have standard names, so that is easy. When generating events, they don't but you could easily add a prefix/suffix or something that the regex would pick up.

- Using the Tag API to tag the VI. I like this because the scripting can just apply the tag or apply it to the template the scripter uses. Downside is: kind of hidden from the user and perhaps if I decide to make some edits to this VI  I may want VIAN to stop ignoring it and it's not immediately obvious how to do that.

 

Note:

I picked the Execution and Performance Label because it didn't seem to fit any of the labels easily. If this is the wrong label and you are an admin, please relabel it.

 

 

Instead of having to open the "Display Format" window everytime you want to drop a control/indicator/constant with a special format value (i.e. 2400000000 as 2.4G) make the control/indicator/constant automatically set to whatever format you put in. For example

 

idea.PNG

 

Typing in 2.4G sets the Display Format to "SI notation".

Typing in 2.4E9 sets the Display Format to "Scientific"

Typing in 2400000000 sets Display Format to "Automatic formatting" etc

 

 

On a For Loop that is configured to have parallel iterations there is a nifty feature when using errors on a shift register.  This feature is explained in an article here.  It basically ensures that For Loops that run 0 times, will preserve the incoming error as if the tunnel was a shift register.  However this feature also means that errors from iteration 0, won't be passed into iteration 1.  What is returned if the loop runs 0 times is just the incoming error.  But if it runs for more than that, the errors are all merged and returned will be the first error seen.

 

Untitled.png

This idea is just to allow this already existing feature to work on non-parallel configured For Loops.  When would this be useful?  Say I want to delete an array of files.  I want to attempt to delete all files, even if there is an error in trying to delete some, just keep trying to delete the other files.  Initially you may think this:

 

Untitled2.png

But that has the clear problem that if the incoming array is empty, then the error will be cleared.  So we often do something like this.

Untitled3.png

And honestly this bit of code isn't that big of a deal, but this feature already exists.  However it only works on For Loops that are configured to run iterations in parallel.  In this case I might be attempting to delete files in a specific order due to their placement on disk, and running in parallel isn't what I want.

 

Since not everyone wants all errors in loops to act this way it would need to be a right click menu to turn the tunnel into a normal one, a shift registered one, or a preserve and merge one.

Untitled4.png

That is what I want.

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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When I was newer to LabVIEW, I found it hard to understand how people could identify front panel object styles e.g. NXG style string control vs System string control. 

 

leahmedwards_0-1648668143626.png

 

I believe it is the sort of skill that takes experience and experimentation, and it only gets more complex when the appearance of the string control is customised. For example, modifying the above controls so they are the same size, they are practically identical...

 

leahmedwards_1-1648668460012.png

 

I have never been able to find a good complete documentation of the differences in appearance and behaviour between different styles of front panel object - seems each style of each type of control has their quirks. So when presented with front panel objects that you did not make yourself, it is hard to 'reverse engineer' them if changes are needed. This makes it harder to learn how to make good UIs.

A potential solution would be to add a property which tells you which style a control or indicator was created as, or most recently replaced by. E.g. modern, classic, system, silver, NXG. An extension would be to add a 'reset to default style' which would behave as if replacing the customised object with an object of that style from the palette. A further extension would be to allow changing of style e.g. in this example from NXG to System via a dropdown box, although not all front panel objects are available in all styles so I can see this being more difficult to implement.


This is probably the ugliest UI mockup you will see all day but I hope it gets the idea across and sparks some conversation:

leahmedwards_2-1648669786430.png

 

This would be accessed via 'properties' on the right click menu of the front panel object.

leahmedwards_3-1648670215478.png

 

 

I'm not very experienced with XControls, QControls etc. so would welcome suggestions about how these should behave. Perhaps there is some nuance to do with styles that I am missing.

This idea is related to this one which talks about setting style for the whole front panel.

Let me know your thoughts!

It takes me too much time recognizing to which class and library this opened VI is belonging to. This is espacially the case when working with LVOOP, having the same VI in different classes.

A subtle improvement would be to have bold colons or 1.5x space between colons and path components in order to improve readability.
Quiztus2_0-1718216652456.png

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:

ContextHelpOriginal.PNG

 

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:

ContextHelpNewIdea.png

 

What do you think?

 

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.

 

original.gif

 

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]

 

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.

 

BertMcMahan_0-1620838414574.png

 

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.

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.

Navigating long lists in LabVIEW can get painful, e.g. for producer consumer design patterns and message handlers. 

This idea is to add submenu parsing for dot notation items.

NickNZ_0-1637183178741.png

NickNZ_3-1637185590012.png

 

Now your case structure can do this:

NickNZ_6-1637185740149.png

I don't think it will effect ranges in the case selector as it requires two dots... e.g. "Init.Step1".."Init.Step4"

 

Credit: This thread for inspiration: https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Case-structure-easier-selection-for-structures-with-a-large/idc-p/4192417?profile.language=en#M43910

 

Suggestions required on how to handle a list in this situation where its a lot of numbered messages. 

 

Also I just learned from a colleague that by grouping controls carefully (& some caveats) with the dot notation on FPGA it allows for a submenu. (And clusters on a FPGA can take up a lot of gates).  So LabVIEW already has some code for this feature. Can it be leveraged? See below:

 

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/Group-FPGA-Controls-With-Dot-Naming/td-p/2767678?profile.language=e...

This post generated this idea which is the same problem in the FPGA space... grouping long lists to make them easier to use.

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-FPGA-Idea-Exchange/Better-FPGA-FP-Control-Selection/idi-p/3074718

 

 

 

 

cbutcher_0-1644062153495.png

The top For loop + Unbundle is the current method to get the Keys and Values of all elements in a Map as arrays. If you need both, this is ok, but I'd prefer the second option, with a native node.

 

If you only want one (e.g. the Keys), then the For loop and Unbundle takes quite a bit more room than a similar-type of node (here the size is taken from the Collection Size node, and the paired outputs in the second row are from Matrix Size).

Can we have nodes to access the keys in particular, and perhaps the Keys + Values of a Map without requiring the For loop?

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:

 

spreadsheed_file.PNG

 

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

One thing I love with LabVIEW is to be able to execute the same source code on multiple targets (Win, Linux, NI Linux RT, etc)

 

I use Linux more and more to deploy my LabVIEW built apps and now instead of VM I use Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 11, in very few steps I can create an Ubuntu instance, add a desktop and xrdp and then remote desktop into it.

 

What would be fantastic is to not event need a desktop and xrdp but just install LabVIEW in the WSL instance via terminal and then run LabVIEW on Windows and select the WSL instance as execution target as I would do for an RT target.

(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:

cp.png

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.

Add a right click menu item to "Boolean Array to Number.vi" for selection of the output data type. Currently this is buried inside the Properties and is not easy to find.

The proposal consists in being able to format the content of a string control, to allow to read more easily: INI, XML, HTML, ...

 

Code Formatter.PNG

 

Regards.