Allow ONLY the Block Diagram to be opened Without Front Panel

[JackDunaway]

Allow us to open only the BD by CTRL+Double Clicking on the VI in the project. Sometimes, it's not necessary to see the FP!

[AristosQueue (NI)]

ctrl+double click already opens the block diagram (or option+double click if, like me, you're on a Mac). It does *also* open the front panel. I mention this only so that those who read your feature and don't know about the ctrl+double click shortcut can happily discover its existence. 😉 

[JackDunaway]

Hold your horses, Aristos!

I just confirmed that if you CTRL+DC on a VI in an LV Project, it does not open the BD or the FP. This only works when you CTRL+DC a subVI already on a BD. Please give PJM lots of kudos for his original idea!

And as Aristos says, just like CTRL+E for the BD/FP toggle, you will indeed be tickled to discover the existence of CTRL+DC.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Ah... I read "in the project" as "in memory" not "in the Project Window". I now see the distinction.

[altenbach]

For symmetry, we should also be able to close (or completely hide) the FP while keeping the BD open. Less desktop clutter. ctrl+e would revive the FP.

[JackDunaway]

Completely agree, altenbach. Currently, if you X the BD, the FP stays open. However, if you X the FP, it brings down the FP with it. It would be nice if those windows were independently closed and opened.

[Darren]

Having VI diagrams open without panels has been spec'ed out in LabVIEW R&D, but has been given a lower priority than other projects.  I would *really* love to see this feature get in.  So let's see some kudos on this one!

-D

[AristosQueue (NI)]

I like the "open from project window" part of this idea.  But when we start talking about only opening the diagram without opening the window, I have to rain on the idea a bit. I like the idea. I do. I'd find it very useful to only have diagrams in many places. And I prefer to judge ideas based on whether they would be good for LV, not whether they would be easy for LV developers. But code has piled up year over year that assumes any time you have a diagram, you have a panel. I doubt we could find all the places where we would need to test for "is the panel loaded?" Yes, it might be doable, but it would be very non-trivial. 

[JackDunaway]

Aristos,

Thanks for the candid comments. Awesome to hear some insider views on these ideas. I hope that all of these ideas, although possibly difficult to achieve with the current LabVIEW framework, are considered for the next-gen LabVIEW that I hope we will see soon.

Regards,

Jack

[Jeremy_Marquis]

A use case for one of my customers is editing a whole bunch of VIs that have the same FP, since they are run using VI server, based on a dynamic list of file paths.  The screen gets very messy when you have 15 VI's open all with identical front panels.  I would love to be able to just open the block diagram.

[Alexander_Sobolev]

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Darren wrote:

Having VI diagrams open without panels has been spec'ed out in LabVIEW R&D, but has been given a lower priority than other projects.  

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It is a veeery low priority for such a good idea