LabWindows/CVI Idea Exchange

On my development machine, I have access to various library functions in the NI-Vision library.  Some of these functions apparenly require the NI-Vision Acquistion license, and some of these require the NI-Vision Runtime license, and some of these require no license.  They are all mixed together and I can find no documentation anywhere that tells me which license(s) I need to put on the deployed computers given what library functions I call in my application.  The only reliably way I have found to determine this is to deploy a test application to a PC that is not licensed and see if the function call fails with an ERR_UNREGISTERED.  It seems that there should be a better way.  Thanks.

One thing, I'm comming accross with very often is, that the drawing updates of Table controls are very slowly, Sometimes, they bring the system to hanging, whithout increasing the processor load, and User Interface events (e.g. Commit events) are not recognized quick enough (up to 30 s delay, depends also on other events, e.g. Timer, HW events etc.).

On most of my projects, I was changing the Table controls to Tree controls, which are much more quicker in drawing updates. But sometimes, I need the Table features (e.g. Ring cells, picture cells etc.), so I'm not able to change the Table into a Tree.

According my expierience, Table controls should be updated every 2 s and Tree controls are able to be updated every 200 ms or faster without waiting for User Interface Events.

You should make Table controls nearly as quick as Tree controls...

Thanks

It would be great to add the possibility to include documentation for (especially global) variables and data structures to the HTML documentation. Currently only functions could be documented. And it would make no sense to duplicate information about data structures used as parameters in each function which is using it.

It would further make sense to structure the HTML documentation at least by the module (.C file) it is defined in, together with the variables and data structures. Such you would get a tree like HTML doc with the modules as 'chapters', then sections for data structures, variables and functions. At the moment I get one big HTML index with documentation from all functions within the project sorted by name (I have not been able to find out how to get another structure in the 'functional index').

In best case there should be a chance to group 'public' data structures, variables and functions independent of 'private' ones to clearly identify the ones which are the intended interface functions and which are module internal helping functions. One way to automatically distinguish between this types might be using all functions documented in .H files as public and documentation from within .C files as private.

Best regards,

  Roland Exler

I apologize if this has already been addressed but this was determined as a issue years ago and forced us to implement a workaround.

We use PloXY for large data sets (up to 16 MB has become pretty standard lately). To address lag years ago, we pared the data to be viewed to 4000 data points in background code and send that to PlotXY. However, when the user zooms - which is always, you must then go back to the original data to find the new best 4K data points prior to plotting the new data. The code usually works well but there are instances where it can shutdown unexpectedly - not often enough to fight through friutfully though.

As for an truly automated perhaps a more logical course of action is to retrieve the panel size and use that for the data sizing. Regardless, it would be nice to use the CVI built in function and then subsequent zooming etc could be possible via standard functions.

I would like an option for "Next Breakpoint" and "Previous Breakpoint" in the menus somewhere, similar to the existing "Next Tag" and "Previous Tag" items.  The reason why I ask is so I can then bind these new menu items to shortcut keys so I can bounce between where I have breakpoints set more easily.  It might also be convienent if there were also toolbar buttons that could be added for next/previous breakpoint.  Thanks.

When developing a process mimic, it is very helpful to have lines and arrows linking the controls, to make it easier to visualise the process flow. A simple example would be to have a line or an arrow from the control that sets a motor's voltage to the control that shows the measured motor speed. Obviously any real-world example would be much more complicated than this.

If there is already a way of doing this, then my request is to make it much more clear in the help system. My searches yielded nothing beyond making a bitmap in another tool, putting controls on top and controlling the Z-plane to get what I want.

This issue has been explained in this thread.

As explained in some documents on the NI web site

• Using a LabWindows/CVI Program as an OPC Server Through the NI Network Variable Engine
• OPC Server development with Shared Variables and overcoming DCOM issues

the Network Variable Library can be used to develop an OPC Server (and a Client too).

While developing an OPC Client, the function CNVGetDataQuality( ) can be used to read the data quality, but there isn't a way to set this parameters while developing an OPC Server.

For this reason a way to set the data quality status and substatus should be added to the Network Variable Library functions that generate OPC data.

I suggest these new prototypes:

• CNVSetScalarDataValue (data, type, value, quality)

• CNVSetArrayDataValue (data, type, &array, NofDims, dims[], quality)
• ...

Currently the axis names on graphs are limited to 30 characters.  I find this to be rather limiting when trying to put in lengthy descriptions of the data plotted.  Could this limit be increased in future versions of CVI?

Currently, this option is in the Options menu, but I think that it makes more sense under build (next to target settings).  I understand the reasoning for this may be that the build options are an environment setting rather than a project-specific one, but I always look under build for this option.  It also doesn't really fit with all of the other items in the build menu, which are all environment related.