Lots of usability research against your idea. The order in the project tree is a developer's view, organized however he/she wants. But when that gets presented to your end users, breaking groups by sections works, but within each section, alphabetical order provides the fastest lookup and the least disturbance when new properties are added to the set. Because of this, all of the properties for all classes are alphabatized within each inheritance layer. This becomes ever more important the more widely your classes are used and the more revisions that are made to the class over time.
Any property menus you see in LabVIEW relating to certain hardware refnum types where the properties are not in alphabetical order are owned by those teams and I disavow all responsibility for their usability. I'd fix them in a heartbeat if I owned that code.
* And I'm sorry, I cannot cite you sources for the research. It was many years ago when we went through that system and I cannot find any of my documents at this point. I'm sure it is somewhere in the mountain of documents related to OO development.
Any property menus you see in LabVIEW relating to certain hardware refnum types where the properties are not in alphabetical order are owned by those teams and I disavow all responsibility for their usability. I'd fix them in a heartbeat if I owned that code.
This is why I don't let AristosQueue own this code. 🙂
I think there are times when an order other than alphabetical makes sense, and this is why our internal object manager supports non-sorted use cases.
You can set the order programmatically. We are not going to change the existing behavior though. I've considered making a dialog to make it easier to set the sort order, but I haven't had time to.
Maybe AQ can't cite sources for the research, but I can provide myself as an example. This week I opened a project in LV 7.0 after not working with it a long time and I was surprised by two things:
How short the list of properties for the controls was (no scripting or private properties, etc.).
How long it took me to find the Visible property, because the properties weren't in alphabetical order.
I remember that the transition took some getting used to when NI switched to ordering the properties automatically, but I think it's preferable, particularly as the list grows longer.
> As you say that usability goes against this idea, the best
> practice in LabVIEW is to order my clusters in the alphabetical order?
For usabiltity of menus, yes, but there are other reasons (like tab order on a front panel for one easy example) to order clusters that take priority over the menus.
