Block Diagram Cleanup Confirmation Dialog with Options

[Broken_Arrow]

• Issue 1: Block Diagram Cleanup is very close to the Reorder button and can be hit my mistake.

• Issue 2: Cleanup Options should be made available per run. Currently, it takes several clicks and scrolling to get to the options.

• A Confirmation Dialog Box with Options, like the one shown, would address both issues...

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Normally when I reply to user suggestions, I try to leave my personal preferences about how LV should work out of it, but in this case, this is one of my personally favorite features, and the G programmer in me really wants a chance to talk:

(removes LV R&D hat and puts on private citizen G programmer hat)

Oh, heck no! Please don't put a dialog there! You'll ruin the ease of use of that button. Click it -- boom. Diagram clean. I've gotten to the point of clicking it after just a couple bits of wiring. A dialog would be terrible. If you don't like the results, click Undo. 

(putting LV R&D hat back on)

Although I can see a theoretical world where you have different settings each time you clean up, I think there'd be practical problems. The settings really were something that were not intended to be played with often. The idea was you'd set them up for your general preferences and leave them alone thereafter. If you're tweaking them on every cleanup then you can end up with regions that are cleaned with different settings and no way to clean the whole diagram, which would quickly limit the usefulness of the too, as far as I can tell. I am guessing you're someone who uses diagram clean up only very rarely and therefore wants it configured for a particular block diagram as opposed to a more hierarchy-wide "theme"?

[Mads]

8 out of 10 times when I click it...it's (still) "Oh no"...followed by Undo. (I'm in LV 2009).

Aristos: Just pop up the dialog if the user Ctrl+Clicks the button instead...that way everyone is happy.

[Broken_Arrow]

AQ,

a) How about a Setup option for the dialog box? "Confirmation Dialog Before Diagram Cleanup"?

b) Whether I use it frequently or not has nothing to do with hitting the button by accident. See Mads comment.

c) The Confirmation Dialog Box could be cleaner if it were just "OK", "Cancel", and another button to "View Options..."

Message Edited by Broken Arrow on 10-27-2009 08:11 AM

[AristosQueue (NI)]

Mads wrote:

> Aristos: Just pop up the dialog if the user Ctrl+Clicks the button instead

Better, but now you have the "magic secret keystroke" problem.

Mads wrote:

> ...that way everyone is happy.

Solutions like this make one or programmers happy. If it isn't findable in the interface, it might as well not exist for most users. Tip strips on the button help, but few people read them.

Broken Arrow wrote:

> a) How about a Setup option for the dialog box? "Confirmation Dialog Before Diagram Cleanup"?

Ok, better than Mad's solution. 

Broken Arrow wrote:

> b) Whether I use it frequently or not has nothing to

> do with hitting the button by accident. See Mads comment.

True. I didn't address that objection earlier. But that seems indicative of a much larger problem that we would need to solve. Terminals on nodes are much smaller click targets, with less space around them and invisible boundaries dividing them from the next terminal. If you are having trouble with the button, LV presents several other situations with much harder mousing. Are those an issue for you? If not, why not? Can we change the button to somehow behave more like a terminal to make it easier to hit? Similarly, do you hit Continuous Run instead of Run? If not, why not?

Broken Arrow wrote:

> c) The Confirmation Dialog Box could be cleaner if it were

> just "OK", "Cancel", and another button to "View Options..."

(G programmer hat)

Now you really lose my personal support -- now there's an OK/Cancel dialog in my way that doesn't even provide any benefit. Clicking "Cancel" and hitting "ctrl+z" is about the same level of user interaction, and at least performing the clean up lets you see what the cleanup looks like and then you can undo it. The time penalty is negligable for all but the most attrocious diagrams, and those are the ones you're most likely to keep the results because any cleanup is better than none. 

Mads wrote:

> 8 out of 10 times when I click it...it's (still) "Oh no"...followed by Undo. (I'm in LV 2009).

(R&D hat)

Was "oh no" because the diagram was not well organized? You should CAR that. If "oh no" is because the cleaned diagram doesn't match your personal style, that is going to happen. The cleanup tool is designed to take the ugly diagrams and bring order to chaos. It picks one particular set of design principles and tries to bring the diagram into line with those. Some users have consciously changed their personal style to match the one that the cleanup tool likes because it means that their diagrams can be auto scrubbed without seeing a lot of changes, bringing consistency across all their diagrams, and making it easy to adopt VIs from other sources into their applications and make the adopted VIs match existing VIs style-wise.

[Broken_Arrow]

I'm just saying there should be a Confirmation Dialog with Cleanup. I'm not debating the efficacy of Cleanup or whether I have crappy mouse aiming skills or not.

[elset191]

I'm with Aristos.  Assuming Undoing the cleanup is almost instant and actually undoes it, I don't think there's any need for a confirmation dialog.

[Broken_Arrow]

[tst]

> ... No one wants to play with me...

I will vote for your idea if you vote for an idea where each time we press the run arrow we get a dialog asking us if we're sure we want to run the VI 😉 (which is actually a much more valid idea, since it does have potential for making you lose data).

Confirmation dialogs in editing programs are generally a bad idea. They just serve to annoy the users most of the time (what do you mean "Are you sure?"? Of course I'm sure!) and for the small number of cases where you do something by accident the undo is there. For the even smaller subset where you didn't notice you did something by accident? Well, I prefer to just live with that.

[Broken_Arrow]

Well said tst.

I withdraw my idea. NI may delete it.

[Mads]

AQ wrote:

Mads wrote:

> Aristos: Just pop up the dialog if the user Ctrl+Clicks the button instead

Better, but now you have the "magic secret keystroke" problem. "

There are plenty of magic keystrokes around - no reason to start shouting about them now;-) It's also not that magical...I would say shortcut keystrokes are more magical as they are often unrelated to the action (except the basic ones) and force you to remember multiple combos. Ctrl-clicking is much easier.

Broken Arrow says: "b) Whether I use it frequently or not has nothing to do with hitting the button by accident. See Mads comment."

Undoing is very quick, so no big trouble there. The confirmation dialog is there already;  it's called "To Ctrl-Z or not". 😉 It's the dynamic tuning of the cleanup parameters that would make my day:-)

Broken Arrow said:

"

I withdraw my idea. NI may delete it. "

Please don't.  Sure - the ideal solution would be for the cleanup tool to work better, however as long as there are cases where one set of cleanup parameters will be better than another, having a way to tune them dynamically will be an advantage for the users.