LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

Post an idea

Decoration element

Hi,

designing a screen layout I frequently encounter the wish to have not only rectangular (and circular) decoration elements, but also one of the type shown below.

Only the upper right rectangular shape can be realized now, while the more complex shape on the left is what I would like to see added in the future.

Instead of two parameters width and height four parameters would be required (two heights and two widths), may be even a fifth parameter specifying the orientation of the shape: as shown, mirrored in x, mirrored in y, mirrored in x and y.

Without doubt grouping control elements is useful; unfortunately these groups may differ in the number and type of control elements.

Thanks for consideration,

Wolfgang

View All (1)

Request for ssh CVI library

In previous applications, we would talk to our product using a telnet session.
CVI has libraries to do this, such as...

ConnectToTCPServer ((unsigned int *)&g_ShelfHandle[iSocketNumber], 23, sAddress, com_ClientTCPCB, NULL, 0);

In one of our new products, it only supports "ssh" which is similar to telnet, but is a "secured shell" connection.
One option is to use putty: http://digital.ni.com/public.nsf/allkb/C49602A79827DDBE86256CE9005757D5?OpenDocument

It is not the most straightforward way of doing things, but at the moment, it is what we have to deal with.

Since the ssh protocol is becoming the new standard in communications (used in all Linux machines, and windows), and most
of the new telnet programs (supporting ssh), I would like to request that a CVI library be created to support this protocol.

View All (3)

As can be seen here, "Save changes" items in Environment options are global to the CVI IDE.

I suggest these options are made project-specific instead. The rationale behind this suggestion is simple: suppose I am developing project A and I enable autosave modifications before compiling and running the project; at the same time I may need to look at the code for project B already deployed to customers, and I want to prevent modifications to the code without notice. At present, while I am testing the application A I set these options to "Always"; if next I come and see the code for project B, I may accidentally make (and save!) modifications that change the code of the deployed app without notice

If these options were per-project I would be granted I am not making mistakes.

Improved error reporting

View All (1)

Hi,

Currently, when a CVI application is deployed on a PC with a DPI setting different than the development machine, the application will generally not look like how the programmer intended as the fonts get resized while the other UI elements do not, leading to overlapping text, awkwardly resized controls, etc. One way that DPI scaling could be implemented in CVI would be to use the same functionality as the 'Scale Contents on Resize' option for panels, where internally CVI could resize the panel and use this scaling to rescale all the UI elements (including fonts) on the panel to the appropiate size per the Windows DPI setting. This would make the panel look a lot closer to what the programmer intended and would generally make most applications usable with different DPI settings without any additional work from the programmer. Per my other suggestion, I would request that the programmer has the capability of disabling this functionality so they can handle DPI scaling themselves should they wish to do so.

Thanks.

Knowledge base Vs forum

What is differnce between the forum and the knowledge base ?

As far as I see the forum is where users ask questions and answers are provided, often by NI representatives.

The Knowledge base appears also to be where questions are aksed have solutions provided.

This means that I could search the knowledge base when the same question/solution is in the forum and vise-versa. Can these be in some way combined with a better search function .

It would also be useful to remember search location based on user login - The amount of times I end up with a solution using LabView (I do not use and hopefully never will use Labview).

Goal:

Extend function PoyFit() available in package Advanced Analysis Library regarding the fitting method.

Details:

Up to now the above mentioned function is available with fitting method "Least Square" only, which is not always the best approach depending on the data and fitting problem. The fitting method "Least Absolute Deviations" (LAD) resp. "Least Absolute Residuals" (LAR) should be offered as well.

Hint:

There already exists a LabView-VI called "General Polynomial" which offers the selection of the fitting method: see link

View All (4)

As CVI evolves (in age and functionality) I feel that additional efforts are required for maintaining the product, i.e, keeping it 'consistent' and avoiding a 'mosaic look' as if assembled by different engineers in different decades...

A simple example but also one I would like to see resolved is entering data types in the UI editor vs in a function call (PlotIntensity in this case):

So, for example, long long translates to int64... Why not simply use the identical terms??

I agree it could be worse but I also feel that this is a valid suggestion for future improvements...

View All (2)

Attaching controls to a splitter in the UIR editor can be a pain if the panel has several controls on it. I'll make an example using CVI example SendMail: trying to add a vertical splitter and attach all controls to it in order to rearrange the panel when the user resizes it. This is the original panel, you can see the vertical splitter in the upper right corner:

First of all, if several controls are selected, they overlap in the right panel of the editor in a way different from the original panel. Here you can see that the decoration indicated by the arrow overlaps two string controls that I'm not able to operate on to select desired attachment mode. This means that I need to proceed to attach controls in steps, hoping new controls added are not overlapped by previous ones. Alternatively I can move controls in the right panel to encover hidden ones, but this ingenerates confusion as controls are no more in the original position besides being a waste of time.

Second item: if selected controls are on the "wrong" side of the panel, they are all grouped (and possibly overlapped) on the closest boundary of the right window. See this example: Send and Quit buttons are only partially visible on the lower left corner of the right window and additionally they are overlapped (in the small box how they appear if I select one of them and move it upwards):

I suggest that this function is improved with these additions:

Honour the z-plane order of the original panel when controls are selected for attachment and moved to the right side
Maintain original controls position when moved to the right panel. Consequently:
Have both scrollbars enabled in Controls on the Splitter window in order to navigate to the controls; at present only one of them is enabled, whether vertical or horizontal depending on the type of splitter

Refactoring

View All (1)

Hello,

usually I work on my projects on two different computers (home/work or development/lab). I would like to see a possibility to more easily move my project back and forth, say by providing two new menu commands

File / Import Project and File / Export Project

I imagine that the Export command generates a zip file consisting of all files required to build the executable (and a distribution) and also exports the editor preferences (probably without the window positions because different computers may have different screen resolutions) etc. The Import command then should load the *c., .cds, .cws, *.fp, *.h, *.prj and *.uir files, import the editor settings, adjust the library menu and load any instruments.

Thanks!

View All (1)

Tooltips Dimmer Callback

As discussed here earlier I am using tooltips that show 'dynamic' information, e.g. the permitted data range of the respective control, available user actions..., These frequently depend on several other controls and parameters.

Right now, all other affected controls etc. need to call a function to re-build the tooltip text, and to more than 90% this is wasted effort because the tooltip text is changed again before it may get displayed...

Thus I would like to suggest a 'dimmer callback', similar to the menu dimmer callback. This 'tooltip dimmer callback' should be called just before the tooltip is going to be displayed, allowing to build/update the tooltip text only when needed.

Thanks

View All (2)

Font installation on Windows Vista/7/8

It appears that when adding a font to the installation package by having the installer copy the font file to the [Fonts] installation directory, all the installer appears to do is copy the font to the C:\Windows\Fonts directory. This is good enough for Windows XP, but in later versions of Windows additional steps must be performed for the font to be recognized by Windows. It would be nice if the installation package could perform these steps when installing fonts on these versions of Windows.

View All (3)

It would be nice to be able to add some comments on UIR objects in the editor.

I'm mainly concerned about versioning: sometimes I happen to apply some modifications to existing panels / objects that are not self evident and I run the risk of forgetting them while revising the project after a couple of weeks.

As an example, I have recently modified some string and text message controls using "Greek" character set so that I can embed omega and delta symbols in them. At present I have a text file describing all modifications I have done in the project, including those in the UIRs, but it means I need to revise this file when I open the project again. It would be good if I could add a comment on those controls and have a visual reminder of it directly in the editor (e.g. with a little symbol like when you add a comment on an Excel cell) so that every time I open the UIR I see the presence of comments at a glance.

View All (2)

Quickly Find And Open Files

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.

View All (2)

LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

Decoration element

Request for ssh CVI library

Enhance the GUI tools with a sideways tree-style tab control

Make "Save changes" environment options project-specific

Add Transparency Attribute for LabWindows/CVI Panels

Improved error reporting

Implement DPI scaling similar to 'Scale Contents on Resize'

Knowledge base Vs forum

Polynomial Curve Fitting with selectable fitting method

Consistent Data Types aka Quality Control

Improvement needed on "Attach controls" function for splitter controls

Refactoring

Include Zoom Functionality for Digital Graph

Portable 'Projects' (Import/Export 'Project')

Tooltips Dimmer Callback

Font installation on Windows Vista/7/8

Align status bar information to UI control standard

Ability to add a comment to UIR panels / objects

Test Driven Development Environment (TDD) using CVI

Quickly Find And Open Files