Why are variants sometimes better to use than clusters?

[broskyar]

I am using variants in a driver I am developing to avoid having to pass a ton of wires between subVIs. My mentor asked me why I was doing this. He wanted to know why I wasn't just using clusters. The only answer I could come up with was that is was convenient to be able to "dereference" (I'm not sure if this is the correct term) the variant for attributes with the Get Variant Attribute VI and a string associated with the attribute of interest. Are there any other advantages of using variants?

[Ray.R]

I am not sure what you are trying to do, but I may agree on using clusters. It is a cleaner approach.

JLV

[Jim_Kring]

Yes! Variants are great when you are trying to write code that must operate on many different data types. However there are caveats that make error handling more difficult and critical. Take a look at the OpenG LabVIEW Data Tools, which make Varaint usage practical. This library is part of the OpenG Toolkit.

LabVIEW Data Tools Presentation - variants, run-time type checking, and data manipulation design patterns

Examples:

• Get Object Attributes as XML


• <
  A HREF=http://www.openg.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=EXAMPLE%20-%20OpenG%20Flatten%20to%20XML>OpenG Flatten to XML


• Python Client to LabVIEW Server


• Universal Probe