Paul,
The actual implementation of the solution is up to you. This is indeed a complex question.
I would offer the following advice:
On globals:
Try to avoid them. I try to restrict the use of globals to unidirectional. If you have ever dealt with a race condition, you will know why. Mistakes are often made with globals, and they are quite apt to become the biggest source of bugs in a program, especially in one as large and/or complex as your appears to be. If you must use globals, try using a shift register, or LabVIEW 2 style global instead. Basically, you use an unitialized shift register with two (or more) cases: Read and Write. This prevents race conditions, but only if the VI is non reentrant. However, implementation is still difficult.
Control References:
I also have read and heard about control references. I have had much use for them, for controlling the appearance of controls and indicators (and decoratiopns too, I guess...). However, I would caution you on using them to pass data around. This violates dataflow in a big way, as you are passing around pointers, instead of data. I believe this is difficult to implement, and even more difficult to keep straight. I personally recommend using them only for attributes of FP components, not for passing data.
So, what do I believe is the most elegant solution? I think a data server is your best bet. This is close to a LabVIEW 2 style global, but a little more active. Simply write all of your data into a subVI in any manner, a queue, a FIFO, LIFO, etc. Then, retrieve the data as desired. Buffering, queuing, etc are all handled by the data storage and retrieval subVI. It becomes sort of a small active database. The two sides (storage and retrieval) are independent of each other, and the code is all handled in the function. A basic version is a LIFO, Last In First Out, wherein the data is overwritten constantly. The data is then read by the reading VI, the front panel VI in your case, at any time, and the data is always the latest. You can add complexity as you need, such as making it a FIFO. This is done by simply writing the data to an array, then reading back the oldest value (by reversing the array and reading index 0.)
I believe this is an elegant solution to your problem. It does maintain dataflow, except that time is taken out of the equation, depending on how you look at it. It simplifies your program because you only need to do three things. Write the data handler, then drop in the function into the VI that writes, and the one that reads. It is also flexible in handling the data.
Good luck, and let us all know how you do.
