Custom presentation of NaN

[M_Peeker]

DBL representation indicators can present NaN which is very handy. However, sometimes it would be good to be able to edit the way NaN is presented, say presenting "---" when the value is NaN. This would save us having to present data as strings with special conditions for NaN. The setting should be available in the properties of the indicator, something like "NaN presentation string". I haven't really figured out how DBL controls should behave wrt this.

[DJ_001]

I second this idea

[ooth]

I whole-heartly agree with this. I hate making filters to change the NaN to "---" or "0" for display purposes.

[altenbach]

What comes up once in a while in the forums is an option to have the numeric indicator empty.

Setting the NaN display to be an empty string would be an easy solution for these problems. 🙂

[scwimbush]

I support this. The availability of a NaN value can be extremely useful to programmers; however users (in particular users of LabVIEW-based applications) should not need to be aware of this unfamiliar syntax, nor should they be faced with it on their front panel. Much more familiar to most users is a display of double dashes or similar to indicate an invalid value. At present, the only method I am aware of to achieve this in the user-facing interface is to replace all numeric indicators with string indicators and to convert all displayed values to strings, testing each one for NaN and substituting with dashes as appropriate. This is very cumbersome from a programming point of view. The suggested straightforward implementation of a custom display setting for NaN would be a great improvement.

[dreeves73]

Excellent idea. As a LabVIEW programmer, I am quizzed by the users of my software what NaN means. There are often instances where I don't want to display anything in a numeric control/indicator. For instance, if you were logging temperature and the sample had not arrived it is more intuitive to show "?", "---" or just a blank string instead of NaN. In most cases I don't want to display 0 instead of NaN because that is misleading. I was hoping NI would have a solution to this by now. It complicates code to add string controls and indicators for numbers.