LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Hi,

Currently to replace something (for instance a node on the block diagram) you have to right-click and then select Replace... and then usually a lengthy navigation into the function palette or onto the disk with the OS file explorer.

Most often I already have a LabVIEW-project open, one or more explorer windows (opened at a useful context), and maybe also one or a couple of pinned sub-palettes - but I am not allowed to replace anything from these locations. I suggest that this will actually be allowed; that is: drag something onto the block diagram, and if you're enough on top of another object, then a replace-outline appears for you to drop your new object into. Here's an illustration for replacing something in the block diagram, but the same could apply to the front panel as well:

All the usual stuff should happen when you replace this way, as if you replaced through the context menu. For instance a prompt to save a VI that leaves memory, automatic update of a project's dependencies etc. Many ideas are submitted to this Idea Exchange to enhance the Replace context menu in different ways, but a feature as I'm suggesting here would improve my own workflow the most, simply because I already have much quicker access to my "replacer", through existing explorer windows, than going through the Replace context menu no matter how intelligently it gets populated.

Cheers,

Steen

Working with class method VIs becomes easily confusing if you need to use VIs from several classes that are inherited from each other. Every class adds or overwrites VIs from one of the ancestor classes but usually you don't know which one. And if you're just user and not developer of this class structure you're usually also not interested in the exact inheritance hierarchy.

Look at the picture: As programmer of the application "main.vi" I'm just interested in Class 3 but I also need to know the internals of Class 1 and Class 2 whereby Class 1 is not even in my project. So I can't see that there are also other cool methods within Class 1 and to get methods from Class 2 I also have to search inside of it and compare against Class 3.

As reference: This is the content of Class 1

What I suggest and expect is the following:

=> The class tree shows all available methods within each single class!

bright colors: Methods that are defined in this class; pale colors: inherited methods

So when it comes to using a queue, there is a somewhat common design pattern used by NI examples, which makes a producer consumer loop, where the consumer uses a dequeue function with a timeout of -1.  This means the function will wait forever until an event comes in.  But a neat feature of this function is it also returns when the queue reference becomes invalid, which can happen if the queue reference is closed, or if the VI that created that reference stops running.

This idea is to have similar functionality when it comes to user events.  I have a common design pattern with a publisher subscriber design where a user event is created and multiple loops register for it.  If for some reason the main VI stops, that reference becomes invalid but my other asynchronous loops will continue running.  In the past I've added a timeout case, where I check to see if the user event is still valid once every 5 seconds or so, and if it isn't then I go through my shutdown process.

What I am thinking is that there could be another event to register for, which gets generated when that user event which is registered for, becomes invalid so that polling for the validity of the user event isn't necessary.

before:

after: