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Currently, if a new version of LabVIEW comes out with new shortcut menu plugin or a quick drop shortcut, that is written in LabVIEW the only way to have that added for older, still supported versions is to save them to for the oldest version, and copy them to the respective folders.

I wish, that the new features in these categories would be available trough download for the supported LabVIEW versions for everyone that has a license.

I would love, if these were separated into their own package, that is a dependency of the LabVIEW installer, but could be updated later from the package manager.

A portal view to the Front Panel elements from the Block Diagram through a feature like "View As Portal". This would be especially useful in the case of G codes doing calculations, simulations, and modelings in the Block Diagram for people like researchers, scientists, and educators.

 

Picture1.png

Picture2.png

History probes are a very useful tool in LabVIEW. However, one improvement can be made to them when working with enums. Currently, the values in enum history probes are returned as numbers, as shown in the picture below:

 

Enum History Probe.png

 

It would even be more useful if enum history probes returned values in terms of the enum item names rather than the numeric values associated with them, as shown in the picture below.

 

Enum History Probe.png

Big clusters that go beyond the limit of the FP are annoying, especially to resize them automatically and reorder the controls.

 

Here are a couple of improvements that could be made:

  • "Reorder controls in cluster..."
    • Allow user to scroll while re-ordering the controls to have access to all elements instead of having to do it in multiple time.
    • Shortcuts like Escape and Enter should respectively cancel-exit and validate-exit the reordering phase
      These are pretty standard shortcuts and already widely used within the Labview environment
  • "Autosizing"
    • Autosize to "Compact". Where instead of aligning all element vertically or horizontally only, they would be in the "most compact" (to be defined) possible configuration to simplify the access to all info in the cluster.
      For instance compacted in a square way, sorted by class (Booleans/numerics/strings etc.)
      I understand that this one might be more complex, but it would be really helpful in my opinion
      VinnyAstro_3-1705680190345.png
    • Less important (to me): In Edit Mode, in case a cluster is autosized to "none" and some items are hidden outside for whatever reason, the developer should be notified somehow. For instance the same way than for strings 
      VinnyAstro_1-1705678727875.png
    • (In the same case than above, allowing scroll bars could be interesting in some situations.)

 

-Vincent.

  • The default widths of the LLB Manager window and the Name column in the multicolumn listbox are too narrow (see the attached picture). They should be widened considerably so VI names are completely visible without having to resize the Name column and LLB Manager window.
  • The multicolumn listbox displaying items should be replaced by a regular single column listbox since only one column in the multicolumn listbox is actually used. This would allow for listbox scaling due to window size changes to work much better. Currently, when you resize the LLB manager window, the multicolumn listbox resizes as expected, but the width of the Name column doesn't change accordingly, which means you often have to manually resize the column when resizing the window.
  • You should be able to select multiple items in the listbox, such as VIs, and open them by pressing the Enter key (like the behavior in Windows File Explorer). The only way to open multiple items from the multicolumn listbox currently is to select them and then right click on them and select Open in the shortcut menu.

When selecting a set of object that are from the same class, I'd like to be able to change some of their main properties at once from the right click menu.

For instance, when selecting a bunch of numeric controls, being able to change all their representation to U8 without having to open the property page (which sometimes take some time to load.

This could be done either via the r.click option, or even via the properties page that would show that it is for more than 1 item. Via the property page 

VinnyAstro_0-1705567415946.png

 

From the property page, it would be nice to have the possibility to easily change their label and caption independently and faster (using tab) than to have to change them manually by double clinking on the labels, hoping to not click on the side of the box.

 

This happens to me all the time:

VinnyAstro_1-1705568287315.png

This could be a viable option in my opinion (Please excuse my poor designer capabilities):

VinnyAstro_2-1705569130610.pngVinnyAstro_4-1705569195313.png

 

 

 - Vincent.

The compare tool is fundamentally broken which is somewhat shocking considering that such a tool is essential to any sort of large scale or long term software development.

 

Attached is a basic LV 2023 example which illustrates some of the many flaws with the tool.  If you compare "old version" and "new version" vi without including cosmetic changes, the tool shows 33 differences, most of which are incorrect.

 

Many of the property accessor VI creation scripting is currently hard coded, or not easily changeable. There might be some conventions around how to name a property accessor, or about the usage of the error handling case structure inside the accessors. It would be nice, if there was a user settable option for these.

The things that I have to change often:

  • The read VI to Get, the Write VI to Set
  • Front panel controls and indicators to the default style
  • Removal of the error handling case structure
  • Renaming the Error in (no error) to error in (this might be solved by the global ini setting though)
  • Organizing the labels to the left for controls and right for indicators on the block diagram
  • Cleaning up the front panel, with the Ctrl+U shortcut, while there is a scripting code in the quick drop to arrange both the front panel and the block diagram, by default Ctrl+F

To fix most of these, I modified the scripting library, for all the templates and the global defaults containing the name for read and write VIs.

It would also be nice if we could override the scripting class as a whole, in order to customize the end result, without needing to go over trough VI again.

In common, the loops are divided into two categories: entry control loops and exit control loops. The entry control loop checks the condition first, and the code will get executed only if the condition is true. But in the exit control loop, the code will get executed first, and then the condition is checked.

So the "for loop" and "while loop" are entry control loops that will not execute the code if the condition is false, but the "do while loop" will execute the code (run) one time even if the condition is false because it is an exit control loop.

 

This is also the case in Labview, where the while loop will execute the code (run) one time even if we wire true to the conditional terminal, but in the for loop, if we wire 0 to the count terminal code inside the loop, it never gets executed.

So it is more meaningful to say the labview's "while loop" as "do while loop".Screenshot 2024-01-05 110311.pngScreenshot 2024-01-05 110320.png

When pressing the "Stop" button when your project is loading you get this screen

 

BasvE_0-1704359642069.png

 

It seems that pressing "No" is the fastest way to abort loading but for bigger projects it still tries to load some classes/libraries/vi's which could take a lot of time.

 

I would love to see a way to abort loading the project instantly.

Bookmark manager is extremely useful for navigating large code bases. Every feature I have in flight, I've got marks for all my expected or in-progress work. Sometimes I'm using it to navigate through related chunks of code. So I'm constantly referencing it. But it gets buried behind windows, just like the equally useful Error List Window. I'm constantly reopening both, but the Error List Window has a quick hotkey to bring it to the front (ctrl+L). I'm finding more and more that I want Bookmark Manager to have a hotkey too. 

 

I've edited my personal menus to have "ctrl+," as the shortcut key, but I wish I could grab ctrl+k as a better mnemonic. Ctrl+k is currently paired with ctrl+j for bring to front and back... and those are keys that cannot be reassigned by users because they aren't main menu items. Personally, I'd place higher priority on accessing Bookmark Manager than reordering zplane, but I understand I might not be in the majority there. 

 

Anyway, the idea is for some standard key to be assigned to the View>>Bookmark Manager menu item. 

Scroll bar should be disabled if all elements are visible! Kudo here to get a big bang for the buck sooner than the 2nd in TOP KUDOED IDEAS from 2013 with 600+ kudos (https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Indicate-that-array-constant-contains-more-elements-than/idi-p/2299860). It points out that the scroll bars are not a viable method because it looks the same when all elements are visible. That is EASY to fix; disable the scroll bar if ALL elements are visible! Currently it is disabled only if an empty element is visible. Perhaps the behavior was originally by design like block diagram scroll bars as mentioned in the reason that the following was Declined, '...without this "boundary", it is impossible to create more space...' but constants can easily be stretched by border handles to create more elements (https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Make-window-scroll-bars-reflect-actual-contents-of-window/idi-p/1844127).

 

dwb_0-1703104642443.png

 

Struggling to replace R&S FSW-K70 by VST and RFmx for my customer, found 16APSK and 32APSK are not directly supported by RFmx DeMod.  The customer is currently using FSW-K70 and their current test scnearios require 16APSK and 32APSK modulation and demodulation.  

 

I found a thread mentioning about APSK support below.  

 

https://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW/APSK-Modulation-Demodulation/td-p/4232293

Timed Loops are only supported on Windows and RT, making it difficult to port applications that use it to Linux.

 

In talking to some NI R&D people, it should be possible to port the RT Linux shared library to desktop Linux. (Perhaps it wouldn't even need to be recompiled, since it's x86.) We also need support in the editor on Linux to allow us to drop the structure.

 

This seems like low-hanging fruit to at least try to implement.

 

It would be nice to have a keyboard shortcut to bring the unfocused BD or FP of a VI to be aligned with the active BD or FP by aligning top edges and distributing vertical edges compressed, like in the picture below. This would help to manage a collection of cluttered FP and BD windows.

 

CuriousSwede_1-1702722071766.png

 

And it would also be nice to "lock" this arrangement, in a way so that the two windows could be moved as one object, but still be individually rezisable.

I´m not to fond of the native Boolean constants and their ability to change value by just a mouse click. To me that is not a behaviour of a constant. What if Pi could be changed to e with a mouse click?

The issue is that when clicking around and cleaning up a messy diagram you may by mistake change a Boolean constant without noticing.

I would like to have native immutable Boolean constants like the ones I´ve implemented with two small VIs. My artwork is perhaps not the best, better ideas are up for anyone´s suggestion.

 

CuriousSwede_0-1702651324354.png

 

I like that there is a zoom feature in the latest release, however, I don’t like how it was done.  Zooming in causes fonts to get really funky. I’m sure there are major reasons for this since LabVIEW IDE is not based on vector graphics.  I would just like to see better font handling for fonts.  

I don't know how many times I've built an application or packed library during my 25+ years using LabVIEW. What still annoys me extremely much is when the AppBuilder gets a tiny error, like "wasn't able to copy this file" (always at the END of the job), or something else having no effect on the (already built and completed) application or PPL itself. Still AppBuilder deletes the whole build, sometimes 30+ minutes time wasted, and simply tells you the build "FAILED". 

 

My suggestion is: Make AppBuilder just a tad smarter and don't delete the EXE or PPL! Just let the developer know what file(s) to copy manually, or what post action didn't work! 

Current Behavior:

When using the "retain all errors" option of the Merge Errors function the combined error message JSON output is not a valid JSON string.

This is the source output of Merge Errors when retain all errors is active - it is not a valid JSON string.

 

<JSONErrorMultiple_1.0>[{
    "status": true,
    "code": 111,
    "source": "This is a test message including\nnewlines"
},{
    "status": true,
    "code": 222,
    "source": "This is a test message including\nnewlines"
}]

 

 

Desired Behavior:

Make the combined errors source string a valid JSON string so that it can be parsed by other tools.

Valid JSON string:

 

[{"status":true,"code":111,"source":"This is a test message including\nnewlines"},{"status":true,"code":222,"source":"This is a test message including\nnewlines"}]

 

 The above JSON string can be formatted nicely by most tools - e.g. JSON pretty print - https://jsonformatter.org/json-pretty-print

 

The below string including the JSONErrorMultiple_1.0 key (but formatted correctly) also works:

 

{"<JSONErrorMultiple_1.0>":[{"status": true,"code": 111,"source": "This is a test message including\nnewlines"},{"status": true,"code": 222,"source": "This is a test message including\nnewlines"}]}

 

 

Current behavior:

When saving a new .lvlib inside a .lvproj the save file dialog brings me to the last saved location which is often a different repo.

 

Desired behavior:

When saving a new .lvlib inside a .lvproj bring me to the root directory where the .lvproj is saved and not the last saved file location. i.e. implement the same behavior as when saving a VI inside a library or a class. This would solve the issue of VIs accidentally being miss-saved outside of the project folder and then getting lost.