Limit Scrolling (with wheel) to Bounds of Panel/Diagram

[Darin.K]

Of course nobody around here creates BDs that are larger than a single screen, but every so often a monstrosity gets dumped in your lap (think forum posts).  The civilized way to scroll these days is the scroll wheel on your mouse or track ball, and LV is at least semi-civilized in this regard.  What annoys me is that LV will not stop scrolling at the content bounds when you are using the wheel.  When I am staring at a large diagram I try to find the corners, but I am thwarted because the scrolling just goes on an on.  Please don't make me resort to dragging the scrollbar or worse, use the arrow buttons.

Fortunately I don't have to do this often, but it is really annoying when it happens.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Curiously, I was just poking around in the mouse scroll wheel code just last week...

I can now tell you that, In fact, the code quite deliberately allows you to scroll further than the bounds. The comments in the code note that this was explicitly done as a bug fix because people wanted to be able to scroll beyond their current boundaries so that they would have blank space to add more code above or below or left or right of their current code. There is a limit already, but it is big enough to allow the current code to be scrolled all the way off the screen. 

I don't have an opininon one way or another about this behavior... I'm just reporting what the history of that code appears to be.

Now, as for going to the scroll bar, you have to do that anyway, because diagrams more commonly go off the screen either to the left or the right, and the mouse scroll wheel only scrolls horizontally when hovering over the scrollbar. 🙂

[Darin.K]

>There is a limit already, but it is big enough to allow the current code to be scrolled all the way off the screen.

Next time you are poking around the code I would check to see if there are a few extra digits in this so-called limit.  I haven't reached it yet despite some serious scrolling.

>Now, as for going to the scroll bar, you have to do that anyway, because diagrams more commonly go off the screen either to the left or the right, and the mouse scroll wheel only scrolls horizontally when hovering over the scrollbar. 🙂

That is why I called LV "semi-civilized".  I have come to accept this, but still use the scroll wheel while hovering instead of click-dragging which is the bane of my carpal tunnels.

Obviously there should be some offset, much like the scrollbars give you, but I could park my car in the space you can scroll into now.  In almost 20 years of using LV I have never used the scroll wheel to make space.

[JÞB]

I like the idea of bounding the scroll but AQ brings up a valid point sometimes you need to add a chunk from the clipboard and need to see where it lands. 

A possible compromise (that may be fairly easy to define) would be to limit scrolling so that some object must remain on screen.  It would be hard to get lost that way and, there is always the Navagation pane for those HUGE diagrams.

[Darin.K]

The more I test, the more curious I am about the "limit" that exists now, I still haven't reached it.  I don't want to appear to be advocating a tight limit, I like the rule of thirds in photography, the scrolling limit should place the corner of the content bounds on one intersection of a 'tic-tac-toe' board, so you have 2/3 of a screen of blank space at most.  Should be sufficient, you can always drag if you need more.

Since the problem seems to be the urge to paste rather large objects, and the arcane steps required to avoid structure explosion, perhaps someday we will be able to place the clipboard contents onto the cursor and avoid the need to make space much of the time.

Or, perhaps a special grid rectangle marking the Content bounds so I know when to step away from the wheel.  Navigation windows in LV and other programs haven't really grown on me.

Or, perhaps the ability to enter limits to the BD size which also serves as scrolling bounds.  Also could stop the "runaway" scrolling LV is prone to on several occasions.

Or, perhaps acquaint more people with the Ctrl-Shift option to drag the BD around.  Great way to add reasonable sized chunks to the BD

Or do nothing and keep annoying me, which I am sure is fun in its own special way....

[Ben_01880]

With the new Apple touch sensitive mouse, horizontal and verticle scrolling

make using LV faster to work with and and far less abusive to my tunnels as well.

In my humble opinion LV's attempt to create the illusion of an unbounded document

just creates more problems that it cures. The bounded paradigm is used all over 

other areas in LV. On the BD, the basic loop structure is bounded, and it provides good logical

methods to expand the content area as needed. Tug it open or closed on all 4 sides. Wonderful !!

Simple and powerful. If the DB and FP worked like this, none of the above would happen.

Thanks

Ben