Allow custom variant probes to be used on clusters/classes

[PNHorn]

It would be really cool to have a custom probe that could be placed on any cluster/class wire to view the data in the cluster, but instead of being displayed as a standard view of the cluster, the labels of the items would be listed along with the data type and the current value (works for scalar or small arrays, not so well for large arrays/waveforms). The standard view of a cluster probe is shown below.

I built a custom probe to do this but found that the data type of custom probes is strictly typed and therefore I have to convert my data to variant on the vi block diagram before adding the probe, which isn't great. I've attached the code for my custom probe, and a screenshot of it below.

If variant custom probes could be used on any data type, this would work.

[LanxiZ]

Good Idea!! This can be very useful!

[Mathis_B]

This is actually about a bug that has been introduced at some point after LabVIEW 7. OpenG had a universal probe which worked similar to Peter's custom probe. The input was automatically coerced to a variant and displayed. At some point after LabVIEW 7 a bug was introduced which disallowed the automatic coercion for custom probes. While I strongly support Peter's idea this more about returning previous functionality rather than adding new one.

[iangbell]

Gets my vote. 

And comment from mathis gives the reason why, when talking this over with Pete, my intitial thought was that you could do this! 

[drjdpowell]

It would be nice to allow other types of coercion too, such as numeric coercion, so a single I64 probe can serve for I32, I16, U32, etc.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

I wish this did work.

For the record, the change in 7.0 didn't introduce a bug, it fixed a bug -- even though coercion probes could be picked, the coercion wasn't actually being done. Now, why the bug wasn't fixed to add the coercion? That I don't know, and the developer who made that call is long vanished.

[Mathis_B]

Adding to Dr Powell's suggestion: If you right click a wire and go to custom probes it will only display the custom probes which exactly match the wire-type. Any other probe would need to get browsed to. With the introduction of coerced custom probes I would like to be able to set a labview.ini key which enables the display of any compatible-by-coercion custom probe. I don't think that needs to be a menu option. Labview.ini would be totally sufficient.

[Chris_Cilino]

I like this idea as well. I have something similar in my containers idea.

Super short video describing the idea here: http://www.screencast.com/t/i4DVZswx

A link to my idea exchange page:http: //forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/The-LabVIEW-Container/idc-p/2853384

A link to the communit page: https://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-36470

Here's my probe for my containers:

[TroyK]

Is this similar to this solution here in the LAVA forum: [CR] VariantProbe

[PNHorn]

@TroyK this is a similar idea, and it looks like the probe on LAVA works in a very similar way to the one I developed. The idea I wanted to add was that it wasn't restricted to be used on variant data wires, it could be used on classes or clusters as well.