LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

Post an idea

Some years ago I proposed this idea that has been partially implemented in CVI 2013.

For this reason I'm going to propose the third point of the original idea again:

the current function where the caret is, displayed in the toolbar. It will be nice if you use a combo so that the user can jump to a different function with a simple mouse click (see attached image)

I use this feature in an open source C/C++ editor (Code::Blocks) that I use for other projects, and I think it's really useful to reduce the coding time.

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Not a big deal in my point of view...

Create a new workspace
Create a new .c file
SHIFT F5
Give a name to the c file when needed
Make sure it does not have a capitalized first letter (dummy.c for example)
CVI then create dummy.cws, dummy.prj and dummy.exe

However, the name of the project in the workspace tree has a first letter capitalized (upper case)

See below the screen capture

This may not be what the user want to see

This is purely cosmectic since opening the cws or the prj file with a text editor one can see the workespace/project use the correct name (no upper case letter)

The only solution so far is to manually go to Edit then "Project.." and modify the project label

Does it make sense?

Yes because the user may have naming convention for project names, project hierachy on disk etc... and he may want to be sure to see thoses reflected in the workspace tree
Yes because by default CVI should not act in the name of the user. If the user want upper case letter for the project name then he should type it otherwise CVI should simply follow the user instructions (and not add upper case letter at the begining of project filename)

Regards, Philippe

So far the documentation is written line by line with a tag at the begining of each line. See below :

/// HIFN Document your function here.
/// HIFN You may use multiple lines for documentation.

It could be nice to add a tag attribute that helps to define regions (or blocks) of documentation. See below :

/// HIFN BEGIN
// Document your function here.
// HIFN You may use multiple lines for documentation.
/// HIFN END

Once done this would help to copy/paste large section of existing documentation. Regarding the "// " that need to be added I believe that a macro or a new editing option ("comment multiline" or "comment selection" like in VBA) could do the job 🙂

Regards, 40tude

I've been using multithreading a lot in a large data-acquisition and motion-control program that I'm working on. There are various reasons, but the speed (or rather lack thereof) in the GUI seriously slows down data acquisition and processing if I try to run everything in the main thread. So, I've got the main thread that handles the user interface; the DAQmx data acquisition thread; and a data processing thread that runs in the background, accepts the data (which comes in at regular intervals) from the DAQmx thread, processes it, and stores it for display and saving to disk.

Anyways, with all of this I make heavy use of the multithreading utilities in the utility library, especially the Thread Safe Queue functions, threadlocks, and the threadsafe scalar variable macros. They work nicely, but 45% of my debugging now consists of finding all of the spots where I forgot to release a variable after locking it, forgot to release a pointer after locking it, or forgot to close a queue after starting it.

Another 45% consists of finding places where I call a function from two different threads, for instance if I start up a window in one thread, and try to call a function for that window in another thread (for instance: calling the main callback function for a panel with the CLOSE event to force it to close when shutting down the main program, for forcing a button-press with the COMMIT event) which doesn't always work. Allocating a list in one thread and calling a function that reads from or writes to that list from another thread really doesn't work!

It would be very nice to have some help in CVI that can count the various threadlock and other thread-safe stuff openings and closings and tell me: "Hey, you forgot to release that one". Since 99% of the time these are locked and released in the same subroutine, it would be helpeful even if it just looked within routines.

It would also be very helpful to have some utility that can keep track of what thread a given function is executing in. Perhaps the best way to do this would be to simply implement a function call-tree utility, with some notation of threads in there; the main problems after all occur when one calls the same routine from two different threads, with different results for each.

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This would allow user to have :

PrintfTextBox(ghPanel, PANEL_TEXTBOX, "%s %d", "Hello CVI ", 2018);

In terms of implementation it could look like :

#define DEFAULT_LEN 1024 // Quick'n dirty fix

// ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
void PrintfTextBox(int panel, int CtrlId, const char *format, ...){
	
        char 		StrTmp[DEFAULT_LEN];
	va_list         args;
	int 		NumLines;
	
        va_start (args, format);	
	// could be nice also to have _vscprintf function call in CVI
        vsnprintf (StrTmp, DEFAULT_LEN, format, args);
        va_end (args);
	
	InsertTextBoxLine (panel, CtrlId, -1, StrTmp);  
	GetNumTextBoxLines (panel, CtrlId, &NumLines);
	SetCtrlAttribute (panel, CtrlId, ATTR_FIRST_VISIBLE_LINE, NumLines);
	ProcessDrawEvents();
}

Regards, Philippe

If you design a table in the UIR editor including cell colouring and at a later time you want to switch the table from indicator to hot or viceversa, cell colouring is lost and all cells default to black text / white background.

I understand that there can be a reason for this to happen (i.e. follow colouring standards for controls / indicators) but it's a hassle being forced to apply every time all colouring effects on the whole table! At least add a dialog box to choose whether to preserve actual colouring or use default black/white.

What is the point of this Idea Exchange, when there is such a low uptake rate from NI?

There have been many very good suggestions posted here, but only 6 are labelled as "In Beta", which I assume means will be in the CVI release this autumn. There are 106 "Under Consideration", but there is no indication what is required to move them to "In Beta". For instance, Wolfgang posted "Reduce and document the NI services running after Windows logon" on ‎04-01-2011. It went to "Under Consideration" on 08-15-2011. Two Years from the original posting, we still have nothing!

How do I justify renewing our Volume Licence Agreement when the LabWindows development effort within NI is so small?

How many people actually are on the full time LabWindows team within NI?

MAC compatibility

Starting with CVI2012 NI provides Win7 style popup menus to select files or a directory. Unfortunately, with the new functions is is not possible to select files from more than one directory, and it is also not possibly to select multiple directories. So one has to choose either to use the old-fashioned, outdated look and feel from the MultiFileSelectPopup function, or to use the new design but limited functionality... This choice is not a good one

I vote for a combination of the two - the look of the new and the features of the old functions

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Hello,

the FileSelectPopup(Ex) provides the option to choose 'Select' or 'Load'... buttons with the benefit that the users choice of files can be limited to existing files only.

Unfortunately, the new MultiFileSelectPopupEx behaves differently, with the new function the user can always select new file even if it doesn't make sense in a specific context, hence the programmer has to take extra care for this scenario. Also, the response is different for "newfile.c" "existing1.c" "existing2.c" and "existing1.c" "existing2.c" "newfile.c". From a users perpective, however, this doesn't make much sense.

I understand that most of these restrictions result from Windows and thus can not be easily changed.

But may be it is possible to use a similar idea of different buttons (OK vs. Select) for the multifile popup, too, allowing the programmer to limit the user to select exisiting files only. OK would keep the current behavior, while Select would restrict the choice of files to existing files only.

Thanks!

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CVI Lizenz

Wenn ein Rechner nicht am Nezt ist, vielleicht das Kabel nicht richtig drin oder am Platz kein Netz mehr frei ist, dann wird CVI mit einer eingeeschränkten Testlizenz gestartet und würde dann eine EXE generieren, welche in der Laufzeit eingeschränkt ist. Oft ist es der Fall, dass jemand CVI ohne Netzt started um im Quelltext etwas zu kontrollieren. Zu einem späteren Zeitpunkt erstellt jemand eine EXE neu und bemerkt nicht, dass das gestartete CVI keine Lizenz hat, obwohl der Rechner Netz hat. Er müsste erst CVI neustarten um die Lizenz zu holen.
Den Fehler bemerkt er erst am Folgetag, wo das Programm mit einem Fehler abgebrochen wird.
Es wäre aus meiner Sicht sehr sinnvoll, dass eine EXE, welche durch CVI ohne Lizenz erstellt wird, auch einen Popup mit eingebaut bekommt, welcher hiervor warnt.
Auch eine Abfrage, welche der Progrmmierer in sein Programm einbauen kann wäre sehr Hilfreich.

Smarter (or correct) EVENT_VAL_CHANGED

Hello,

I just discovered a strange and unexpected behavior of EVENT_VAL_CHANGED which requires that I will have to double check all my previous software written in CVI...

For some reason I have assumed that if the EVENT_VAL_CHANGED is triggered on a numeric control the new value will be different from the old one. This may not be true - the value may be still the same!

Since for more experienced users this seems to be a well-known fact I doubt that NI will call it a bug, hence I am suggesting an improved behavior : Please, for numeric controls, fire the EVENT_VAL_CHANGED event only if the numeric value has changed...

(Right now, if the numeric control displays 1.0000 and I enter '1 ENTER' the value remains the same (at least), but the EVENT_VAL_CHANGED event is triggered...)

Thanks

PS: Also the documentation seems to be misleading: It (in CVI2010) states:

The EVENT_VAL_CHANGED event is generated continuously while the user is performing an ongoing action which results in the value of a control changing.

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"Auto hide project tree" environment option works differently depending on which file you click in the project tree: ig you double-click a UIR file the file is oepned in the editor region and the project tree remains open; on the contrary, if you double-click source or include files the project tree closes immediately so that if you want to open more file you need to move the mouse on the leftmost side of the window to display the project tree again.

This is particularly annoying when working on laptops, that is when the auto-hide feature is more necessary because of the limited screen size of these machines (not considering the ugly feeling when using the laptop's touchpad instead of a regular mouse, but this is not a CVI problem )

I'd like to have the project tree remain open even when double-clicking a source file, until I move the cursor out of the tree area.

Hello,

as discussed in this thread changing the map mode of a graph axis from linear to logarithmic scaling may perform sub-optimal if the graph shows plots containing zero or negative data values. Fortunately, there is a workaround.

The suggestion presented here is to make this workaround unnecessary... Ideally, the graph should take care by itself if plots need to be updated, i.e. changing the attributes ATTR_XMAP_MODE and ATTR_YMAP_MODE from VAL_LINEAR to VAL_LOG should result in updated plots.

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LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

A new listbox with all the functions in the *.c file

CVI should not capitalize the first letter of the project name in the Workspace tree

Documentation tags improvement - New tags that define blocks

Intelligent support for multithreading in CVI editing.

Add CTRL+A & CTRL + C to CVI Profiler window

Add PrintfTextBox function to the Text Boxes class

Preserve table cells colouring when switching from indicator to hot in the UIR editor

Actually implement some of these ideas; only 6 ideas are in Beta compared to 271 New or Under Consideration

Allow selecting numeric representation from drop-down menu

MAC compatibility

Improved MultiFileSelectPopupEx and DirSelectPopupEx functions allowing to select files from more than one directory

adjust MultiFileSelectPopupEx to FileSelectPopupEx

CVI Lizenz

Smarter (or correct) EVENT_VAL_CHANGED

Keep project tree open when you click a source file with "auto hide" enabled

Better treatment of linear -> logarithmic scaling of graph axes

Custom, error-specific menu items in build output window

Keep tag during cut & paste

Smarter variable view (array elements)

Multiple Clipboards