LabVIEW Idea Exchange
Currently, having one misconnected wire breaks the entire wire tree and pressing ctrl+b wipes out everything. Poof!
In the vast majority of (my) scenarios, a broken wire is due to a small problem isolated to one branch so it does not make sense to drag the entire wire from the source to all valid destinations down with it and break everything in the process.
Here is a simplified example to illustrate the problem (see picture).
In (A) we have mostly good code. If we add a wire as shown, that wire (and VI!) must break of course because such a wire would not make any sense.
However, it does not make sense to also break the good, existing branches of the wire (the cluster in this case), but that is exactly what we get today as shown in (B). If we press ctrl+b at this point, all broken wires will disappear and we would have to start wiring from scratch (or undo, of course :)). Even the context help and tip strip is misleading, because it claims that the "source is a cluster ... the sink is long ...", while that is only true for 25% of the sinks in this case!
What we should get instead is shown in part (C). Only the tiny bad wire branch should break, leaving all the good connection untouched. Pressing ctrl+b at this point should only remove the short bad wire.
The entire wire should only be broken in cases where nothing is OK along its entire length, e.g. if there is no source or if it connects to two different data sources, for example.
Summary: Good parts of a wire should remain intact if only some of the branches are bad. Wires that go to a destination compatible with the wire source should not break.
(Similarly, for dangling wires, the red X should be on the broken branch, not on the good source wire as it is today)
Implementation of this idea would significantly help in isolating the location of the problem. Currently, one small mistake will potentially cover the entire diagram with broken wires going in all directions and finding the actual problem is much more difficult than it should be.
Available in LabVIEW 2020 and later. When a wire is broken due to an invalid sink, only the wire branch to that sink is displayed as broken.