LabVIEW Idea Exchange

It would be great if the invert option is given for all possible Boolean terminals like input and output of Boolean functions, controls, indicators like what we have in compound arithmetic function.

"Auto-insert Feedback Nodes in cycles" option under Tools > Options > Block Diagram should default to OFF. I am a believer and preacher of FN's since Darren's blog post about them, but it seems I can only get FN's to appear when I mis-wire, not when I want one.

Plus, they really scare LV beginners (and me!) when I miswire. GAH! What just happened??

LabVIEW loops are quite flexible and allow me to do just about anything I want, but I often find myself writing the same code over and over again trying to iterate across different data types and data structures. There are several situations where smarter looping constructs could greatly simplify my code. One simple example is stepping by a delta between a minimum and maximum value. Currently, I have to calculate the number of iterations required ahead of time (for a for loop) or do a comparison with the maximum (with a while loop) and use shift registers to maintain the intermediate value. I'd like to be able to wire the max, min, and delta to my loop and have LabVIEW do the required calculations for me. The iteration terminal could also adapt to the proper data type given the input parameters. Perhaps the iteration terminal would have two outputs, one with the current iteration count and the other with the proper iteration value.

Another useful feature would be allowing me to wire a queue reference to the loop count terminal of the for loop and having it automatically pop each value from the queue and feed it to me through the iteration terminal. It would do this until there are no values left in the queue or until the code stops the loop. One could write an algorithm that pushes new points into the queue from within the loop or push the current value back onto the queue for later processing.

I'm sure there are other useful iteration strategies that are fairly common, please share them with the community. 

Each page of a tab control should behave just like a pane does.

This means it should be possible to put splitter bars on a tab page.

This way one could build real nice front panels that look good when resizing, even when using tab controls.

At the moment I always have to decide: Do I need several tabs or is it important to be able to resize the panel?

There is no way to have both at the same time

(OK, there is one way - but I know much better ways to spend my time than programming all those pixel calculations to resize every control programmatically  )

Here is a quick scetch of a dialog front panel that could be improved very much by using splitter bars and  "fit control to pane":

Look what happens when the panel is resized: It's a big waste of space that could be put to a better use by extending the tree.

Structures have many right-click options, but the property dialogs are currently very sparse (only label and subdiagram label). Let's compare the current right-click options of a FOR loop with the actual properties dialog, and we can see that many useful properties are missing (visibility of conditional terminal, autogrow setting, etc.). The parallelization has it's own standalone dialog, why not have all these settings on a new tab instead?

I propose that these scattered properties should all be integrated into the single properties dialog to keep things better organized. Here's how the properties dialog of a FOR loop could look like after implementation of this idea.

Similar changes could be made for all other structures.

LabVIEW's case selector icon (?) is taller than tunnels, so it interrupts wiring flow whenever a standard VI (4-2-2-4 terminal configuration) uses one of the terminals as the selector and an adjacent terminal is also wired as a tunnel.  I'd like to see the case selector be the same height as a tunnel.

I did a search for explain error - I did find this idea which is similar but for probes.

Explain Error is a feature I have been using more lately but its not available for an error that is in an array (LabVIEW 2010).

It would be great if it was!

Cheers

-JG