LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Like some other ideas here and here, I find the connector pane right-click context menu to be a burden. I would like to see some of the menu items moved or rearranged.

For example, I’ve been using LabVIEW a few years, but the first time I tried many of the shortcut menu items was today. If I were looking for them, I would probably expect to look under "Patterns".

Additionally, if I click a little to the right, three more of the menu options are already available in a much shorter context menu, so I don't feel like they are needed from the connector pane. (Personally, I rarely perform these actions through the icon, anyway, but I’m sure some people do.)

I propose removing the top few items and putting the others in the patterns sub-menu.

Something like this:

Or, if combining the text and patterns creates a UI programming issue, I think it would be acceptable to leave "Patterns" and add a new sub-menu:

Thank you for considering this idea!

-joeorbob

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. 

Right-clicking a subVI and selecting "Find all instances" is extremely useful. However there is currently no way to filter the results by a particular input or output being wired in the caller VI.

My proposal is: It would be great to be able to filter by a particular input or output, or a particular combination of inputs and outputs, being wired in the caller (i.e. being used by the caller) when using "Find all instances". There are multiple ways of exposing such a filter to the user, so I won't attempt to mock up a design here.

Background

Recently I refactored parts of a medium-size LabVIEW project that I was working with for the first time. As part of the refactoring I wanted to remove an output of an FGV-type subVI with multiple inputs and outputs, because I suspected that that output was unused by any of the callers. Using "Find all instances" I found around 60 instances where this subVI was called. I had to Ctrl + G through the results list and check that the output I wanted to remove was not used in any of the callers. This would have been simpler if I could have set a filter condition to this effect, as the search would have returned only those callers that were using that output. In this case, the search would have returned 0 results, thus confirming that the output was unused.

Side-note: You are probably thinking "You could have disconnected the output terminal from the connector pane, and used the Error List (broken run arrows) to find the broken callers." That's what I intended to do before I realised that virtually all of the caller VIs were dynamically called VIs. Therefore those VIs being broken wouldn't have broken the main VI of the app. I put those dynamically called VIs into the disabled case of a Diagram Disable Structure such that they were loaded in memory and "Find all instances" would search inside them.

Thanks

Background

This idea is derived from the following idea: Front panel controls and indicators should be genuine after being replaced with control or indicator of different style . Please read that thread for background.

Problem
There are three ways to replace front panel controls and indicators:
1. Right-click the control or indicator, select Replace, then select the select the object to replace with.

2. Select the control or indicator, press Ctrl + Space to bring up QuickDrop, search for the object to replace with, then press Ctrl + P.

3. Select a control or indicator and press Ctrl + X. The control will disappear from the front panel. Select another control or indicator. Press Ctrl + V. The second control is replaced by the first control.

The first two methods preserve some of the look and feel of the original object. For example, when replacing a Modern-style string control with a classic-style string control, the end result is a control that looks like a mixture between the two styles. This may or may not be desired behaviour.

The third method does not preserve any of the attributes of the object that was replaced. The end result is a control that looks exactly like the control that was selected when Ctrl + X was pressed.

Both behaviours can be desireable in different situations, and it's good that there are ways to achieve both. However, the third method is not easily discoverable.

Proposed solution

A more intuitive and discoverable solution could be: After right clicking an object, selecting Replace, and selecting the object to replace with, a two button dialogue message could popup. The message could ask something like "Preserve attributes?" The buttons' Boolean text could be "Yes" and "No".

Ideally the same popup would appear when using the QuickDrop Ctrl + Space, Ctrl + P method.

This would:

1. Enable the user to select either to preserve attributes or not, depending on their intention at that particular moment. (the same user may prefer either behaviour at different times)

2. Increase awareness that two behaviours are available

Thanks

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. 

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...

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:

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

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!

I frequently perform operations on Maps of Objects which hold private data where I do not intend to alter the structure of the Map.

Existing Solution

However, Maps are a bit clunky to work with when operating on all Elements. You must first get the list of all Keys, then use an In Place Element Structure within a For Loop and Shift Registers to operate on each Element as follows:

Potential issues with this:

1. Unnecessary branch of the Map which may not be optimized by the compiler
2. Excessive block diagram editing which slows down the development time involved when working with Maps
3. Potential for syntactical errors due to complexity of this operation

Proposed Solution

It would be great if there were some kind of auto-associating tunnel available to For Loops:

Note that the Key is not modifiable, nor is it even available within the For Loop.

Perhaps the tunnel icons must be changed so they are not confused with shift registers.  I just copied the association icon from the map datatype icons.

This level of functionality is similar to the syntactical abbreviations available in most languages which support maps as a standard data type.  I originally wanted this kind of functionality for Sets as well, however modifying the values may result in structural changes to the set itself due to the uniqueness constraint.  As such, this is only applicable to Map Values within For Loops.

It may not be obvious, but this kind of tunnel would not be available to While loops.

Selection

This option would be available on the block diagram through the context menu items of the Map datatype Input Tunnel to the For Loop.