By the way, just in case you don't know them, the OpenG data tools already do the recursive parsing of variants, so at least that part is mostly handled for you.
One problem with the variant, I actually was using the lables of the controls as tags in my application. Varant only pass the data, I might be back to the references. I need a generic terminal which will adapt to the input wire as a strict type, probably cant do this without some scripting method.
The OpenG data tools allow you to get the data name, which is the label for the control in your case. See here for an example (and follow the link at that post)
MGI just released a new solution which essentially does the same thing as the OpenG solution, but is supposed to work faster and uses vi.lib VIs for the type parsing, but I haven't checked it out, because it's 8.x only.
