How to find all subVI value changes to a control inside a cluster?

[yevoclabview]

I have a question that I've had brewing for many years now, and as of today this question became less philosophical to me now that I have a VI project with hundreds of VIs in it to work through... If I have a cluster that is passed between/through several subVIs, is there a way to find all of the reads/writes to a particular control inside that cluster? For example, if I use a global variable, I can find all instances of where that variable was changed. Many times, a cluster is used to pass data instead of many global variables, but I don't know of any way to quickly find where particular parts of that cluster are read/written in subVIs. Global variables become a headache when there are too many of them flying around, but I can't keep track of reads/writes in clusters without manually looking through a few hundred VIs that take in the cluster. Is there a feature to do this that I'm not aware of? Hopefully this question/problem makes sense. This may spark a architecture discussion, which I would welcome, since I will need to build projects of this scale in the future, but I also feel quite stuck when clusters are used (by myself or others) to pass data around. Thanks! John

[crossrulz · Accepted solution]

If you are using Unbundle By Name and Bundle By Name, just do a text search for the control name.

[JÞB]

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@yevoclabview wrote:
I have a question that I've had brewing for many years now, and as of today this question became less philosophical to me now that I have a VI project with hundreds of VIs in it to work through... If I have a cluster that is passed between/through several subVIs, is there a way to find all of the reads/writes to a particular control inside that cluster? For example, if I use a global variable, I can find all instances of where that variable was changed. Many times, a cluster is used to pass data instead of many global variables, but I don't know of any way to quickly find where particular parts of that cluster are read/written in subVIs. Global variables become a headache when there are too many of them flying around, but I can't keep track of reads/writes in clusters without manually looking through a few hundred VIs that take in the cluster. Is there a feature to do this that I'm not aware of? Hopefully this question/problem makes sense. This may spark a architecture discussion, which I would welcome, since I will need to build projects of this scale in the future, but I also feel quite stuck when clusters are used (by myself or others) to pass data around. Thanks! John

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You are looking at this the wrong way.  And you just learned, the hard way, that passing clusters around through a large project has problems.  Lets see if we can prevent needing to find all the instances where data is writen, read, folded, spindled or mutilated by making exactly 1 vi responsible for doing all of that.

Ben's famous Action Engine Nugget is always a good read.  By using an Action Engine you avoid exactly the problem you are seeing and a few more as well.