LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Hello all,

This is a rather non-technical request.  When classes are created from Project Explorer, a color is assigned by default.  If that's a color you're fine with, you hastily modify the icon and move on to more important matters.

While the color assignment works well enough to serve its mundane purpose, I've noticed several weaknesses:

1. The object "cube" icon is not so easily edited because of its pretty, blurred lines and several colors.
2. As far as I can tell, there are exactly six color families that LabVIEW assigns to classes: "goldenrod," blue, green, red, yellow, and purple.
3. Depending on the order you make your classes in, the colors can introduce confusion.  e.g. What if three layers of inheritence are all blue? Not a big deal, but confusing nonetheless.

My suggestion is this, and maybe there's a better way to do this:

In the class properties dialog, why not allow the user to simultaneously assign a color scheme to the icon and the class private data ("cube") icon, in one quick step?

This would adjust the hue of the "cube" icon and the VI Icon Template at the same time.  It could also optionally modify the wire color accordingly.

Leave everything else on the UI as it is - this would be a new feature in addition to that pre-existing methodogy.

Thank you as always,

Jim

Note: For the sake of simplicity I chose the color picker dialog that LabVIEW uses everywhere else.  Any of several other methods could be used, such as a pulldown menu with predefined color names and swatches.  (Say, a dozen selections)

Related ideas I came across:

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Change-the-color-of-different-classes-in-the-project-explorer/idi-p/1958803

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Class-ICON-update-to-Class-wire-scheme/idi-p/2516440

Currently: When you "Find Missing Items" in a project, it thinks a few seconds (on a large project) and pops up a non-resizable window. You can double click on an item in the list, which closes the Missing Items list and it highlights the missing item in the project. You remove that item (or relink it) in the project, and then have to "Find Missing Items" again. Wait a few seconds, rinse, repeat...

Proposed:

1. When you double click on an item in the Missing Items list, do not close the list - leave it open, and gray out items that have been taken care of and are no longer "missing" (like the find dialog, when you delete a found item).

2. Allow the columns to be sorted by clicking on the header Name, Location in Project, or Path (this one holds a dear place in my heart)

3. Finally, allow the window to be resizable (a common request...).

(I have given the example for "Find Missing Items"... you can apply the same concepts to "Find Items with No Callers") 

When a control is disabled, especially a large table or string control, it would be nice if the scroll bar would remain active in order to view the contents of the control, without the ability to actually change it.

I am not asking that the default behavior be changed, however a right click property/property node "scroll when disabled" would certainly have some value.

The idea of overloading methods is wide spread in other languages. Labview already supports this in a way with polymorphic vis.

The code snippet below has 2 classes, parent and child

methods are described in the image below. 

The underline idea is that parent can define 1 method (poly.vi) that can handle multiple inputs (polymorphic) but does not have to implement the functionality for all the input types (it just needs to know about them) and the child class can override poly.vi and the interface it want to implement.

Even though the code above is correct, Labview gives an error.

"Dynamic dispatch VIs cannot be members of polymorphic VIs."

I dont see why not, since dynamic distpacthing will still have an entry point for both classes (poly.vi) and choosing which polymorphic vi to use will be define at design time.