LabVIEW Idea Exchange
I've been working with LabView since 1995, and love it. Currently I write and maintain a pretty large program that is distributed to end users as part of a commercial product, and so have run into difficulties around two main issues: nice GUI's, and dealing with dozens, if not hundreds, of variables. Some of these items may have already come up in discussion forums or other's idea posts, but here they are:
1. Tab splitters - would permit properly resizing a GUI based around tab pages by creating internal panes on each page. And yes, I have already tried out and rejected some of the workarounds described in the discussion forums.
2. Array element properties - I would really like to be able to programmatically change the properties of individual array elements, and especially of individual cluster elements within individual array elements.
3. Cursor legend - the LV 2007 cursor legend was fine, but I hate the current one, mostly because it takes up too much space vertically.
4. Floating graph elements - It would be nice to be able to define elements like plot legends, cursor legends, etc. as floating, so that when they are turned on they do not require extra space in the window. The user could turn them on, make changes as needed, then turn them off again.
5. Edit Event Case dialog - alphabetically ordering the pop-up local and global variable lists was a boon to those of us with dozens of controls and indicators in a VI. Something similar should be done for the Edit Event Case screen: order the list of controls/indicators alphabetically.
6. Case Structure chaos: I often have three or four cases per subdiagram, and especially when tied to an enum ring with actual phrases, I get the dreaded ellipses between cases:
Then I have no clue as to which cases are indicated by ellipses. An 'edit case' dialog would be really helpful, or at the very least, showing the entire list when the text edit tool is placed in the text field.
7. Control position display/setting - add fields to view/set the position of a Front Panel control in the Properties dialog, next to the view/set fields for size. Add increment/decrement buttons for all four fields (width, height, top, left).
8. Tagging controls - some means of creating groups of controls that could be addressed en masse. For example, all the controls on one tab could be in their own group. Then, the pop-up list of controls that appears when you right-click a local variable would not be one long list, but would be organized as a tree; each branch would be the controls from one tab page. Same for the Event Case dialog.
thank you, NI and the entire development community!
Dan
