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Kevin.Shirey

VI Description on block diagram

Status: New

Include a pallette item under Structure for VI Descrption constant placed on the Block diagram of the code instead of going to VI Properties to read/write the descrption. It's very useful to set and read the VI description on the black diagram for self documenting code, code reviews and distribution of drivers simplifies the help others may need.

Kevin Shirey | CLA | Champion | Senior Project Engineer II | DMC
4 Comments
fabric
Active Participant

Cool idea. For completeness it would be nice to have a front panel equivalent too.

tst
Knight of NI Knight of NI
Knight of NI

For the FP, this can probably be done today easily enough with an XControl. For the BD, it might be doable with XNodes, although I'm not sure how well this would interact with the rest of the diagram.

 

Technicalities aside, I'm not sure whether I like this idea or not, primarily because it's not clear to me how such a block would interact with the other elements in the FP/BD. I can say that even the text-only comments you find on things like OpenG FPs can be annoying.

 

Beyond that, it should also be pointed out that you don't need to go into the properties dialog to see the description. The context help window shows it when you hover over the VI icon when editing it or when it's called as a subVI (which is generally where this is helpful). If it has detailed help you can also access it from there or with a right click on the subVI. This doesn't solve the editing issue, though. There are some other ideas around it regarding that topic and some tools to help today with editing properties for VIs quickly. If you want, you can write a floating tool which would allow you to read/set the properties from the VI which has focus. Do a search for "scripting springboard" to see an example of how this can work.


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drjdpowell
Trusted Enthusiast

Was about to post an identical idea.  

Petru_Tarabuta
Member

+1 kudos.

I accidentally posted a similar idea, which has been marked as duplicate: VI Description-linked free label on block diagram and/or front panel