LabVIEW Idea Exchange

For modern application development we need better methods to detect wheter our application is called to open a file.

Currently the only help NI gives is based on command line parameters. And we need to jump through loops to get it working to react on opening a file when the program allready runs.

This is a major showstopper in creating professional applications.

LabVIEW 8.2 had a hidden event for getting this event, which unfortunatly doesn't work in later versions.

When you or two numeric numbers it does a bitwise or.  The same should happen when using Or Array Elements, but it is not supported for numeric arrays. I see no reason why it shouldn't work just the same?

Important disclaimer: I am sorry, this is not my original idea, because it is (together with many other nice features!) already implemented in the LabVIEW UI builder. Credits go to the relevant NI developers.

This Idea posted here tries to see how much interest there is in such a feature and to show support that we want this also implemented in plain old LabVIEW. Personally, I really like it! 🙂

(It is also somewhat related to this idea (but probably not a true duplicate), especially my comment there already exapands on the idea!)

The Unused Items Tray (see also e.g. Christina's Blog entry) is an area on the diagram that contains terminals or FP objects that have not yet been manually placed or are currently only "used" on the BD "xor" FP, i.e. not on both.

The current problem in LabVIEW is that if you place a new control on a complicated VI, the terminal will end up on some random place, typically piled well camouflaged on top of some other diagram structures and possible a scroll away from where it is actually needed. Similarly, if we create a control or indicator from a terminal on the diagram, the control will typically be outside the carefully placed visible area and there is no way to grab it without first messing up the FP alignment by either scrolling or enlarging the window.

In all these cases, it would be nice if the objects on the "other" window would land in a predictable reserved floating location for quick and easy manual placement where they belong. During development, there are probably a few terminals that are not yet used or connected, and we should be able to place them back into the unused items tray of the diagram so they never scroll out of view or get misplaced.

On the front panel, we might have some spare controls "parked", and they would not show in run mode at all. This could even be abused for "local variable zombies" (=hidden controls with the sole purpose of making a local variable) along these lines, which might be OK (=better than hidden controls!). Front panel items in this tray would look like their palette entries. We don't want e.g. full-sized graphs in there!

Now, how should all this look like? In order not to cover valuable diagram space, it should be something that collapses to near nothing when not used and would only expand to show the current contents when hovering or clicking in a special area. Of course there should also be an option to pin it open. When minimized, it should look different when "not empty" vs. "empty".

I would like to be able to create BD array constants from the predefined string and numeric constants.

Presently you cannot create an array constant by dropping a predefined constant into an empty array box on the BD.  Arrays of string constants such as Carriage Return, Line Feed, Tab, and Space need to be created programmatically using build array or manually using the '\' codes or hex codes.  Arrays created in such a manner do not have the graphical indications of what is contained.  Some of the constants (Space) are actually VIs, which may complicate things for NI.

Similarly the Math and Science constants like pi and e should be allowed to be dragged to an array of DBL.

Lynn