LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

Summary:

Hovering over the breakpoint diamond, a tooltip should display the breakpoint condition.

Description:

Useful breakpoint information, such as the breakpoint condition, line number or hit count could be displayed when hovering over the breakpoint diamond in the source editor. Otherwise, you would get this kind of information by looking at the breakpoint in the Breakpoints Window or the Edit Breakpoint Window.

If a panel is made part of a tab (InsertPanelAsTabPage) or if a panel handle is obtained from a tab (GetPanelHandleFromTabPage), there are some restrictions as to how you can use that panel. Some of those restrictions could be lifted if the panel knew which tab it belonged to.

I suggest the addition of the following (or similar) attributes:

GetPanelAttribute(Panel, ATTR_PANEL_PARENT_TAB_CTRL, &TabCtrl);

GetPanelAttribute(Panel, ATTR_PANEL_PARENT_TAB_INDEX, &TabIndex);

And of course you can already get the parent panel with:

GetPanelAttribute(Panel, ATTR_PANEL_PARENT, &ParentTab);

So, now that a panel knows the tab it belongs to, some obvious associations can be handled by the UIR library:

• Calling DiscardPanel should, internally, call DeleteTabPage instead of the current undefined and illogical behavior
• SetActivePanel should do a SetActiveTabPage instead of the current buggy behavior
• SetPanelAttribute(.., ATTR_DIMMED) should do a SetTabPageAttribute(..., ATTR_DIMMED)
• - etc...

This would allow the user to select at runtime if he wants a Multiple Panels application (MDI) or a Single Panel/Multiple Tab application (tabbed SDI) and almost no changes are necessary to the code.

Summary:

Improve the Breakpoints Window, so that breakpoints can be more easily managed.

Description:

1. Change the Breakpoints Window, from a modal dialog to a dockable window (similar to the Watch Window). Debugging can be more easy this way.

2. Allow breakpoints to be grouped, disabled/enabled and edited in user defined categories. This allows users to easily collectively manage several breakpoints at a time. It also helps the user to logically group breakpoints, depending on various issues issues that he might be working on.

3. Breakpoints could also be sorted from a pop-up menu by filename, line, hit count, etc.

Summary:

Quickly find and open a file in your projects by typing in substrings of the name of the file.

Description:

Implement a quick way to find files in a CVI project, by typing substrings of the filename.

A certain keystroke combination should launch a popup-dialog (similar to the picture below), displaying the user a list of files that contain certain substrings. This helps significantly when having to deal with large projects containing many files.

Summary:

Display more struct member information during source editing and during debug.

Description:

While editing source code, CVI only displays the struct members, but no information regarding the type of the member (or declaration information, line file and line).

Add a tooltip to the right of the pop-up displaying the struct members in the source editor to display this information. Similar to this picture:

Also add support for displaying nested structs and even display the member values while debugging, in form of a tree, when execution is suspended (CVI currently only displays the memory address of that struct variable).

Summary:

Implement and add easy access to multiple clipboards inside the CVI ADE.

Description:

The CVI ADE (at least the source editor) should keep the most recent sequences of text that had been copied (Ctrl+C) to the clipboard.

It should also allow access to the multiple clipboards through some pop-up menu, displayed at a certain keystroke combination.

Summary:

Implement Swap Lines shortcut key (Alt+Up/Down).

Description:

Often, I need to swap two lines of code in my source file or maybe just move one or several lines up or down inside my code.

In order to do this, you normally have to do a cut and paste in order to move the lines.

Having a Swap Lines feature in the CVI source editor could significantly speed up this process, especially when you have to handle big chunks of code.

The Swap Lines mechanism could be triggered by the Alt+Up/Down.

This feature should also support multiple lines selections.

With the batch built dialog, it is possible to select "all releases" and/or "all debugs". This button causes, that all 32-bit AND 64-bit releases and/or debugs are selected (marked). It would be helpful, if the selection buttons would be splitted in "select all 32-bit releases", "select all 64-bit releases", "select all 32-bit debugs" and "select all 64-bit debugs". When I develop e.g. 32-bit Software, I don't need the 64-bit versions.

It would be also helpful, if it is possible to select the sequence of the batch built. For example: project 1 depends on project 4, but project 4 is currently compiled after project 1 etc.