Visual help in fixing broken local variable linkage

[Intaris]

I sometimes delete controls from the BD and realise some time (from milliseconds to minutes) that I have some broken local variables.

I get greeted by the hugely informative imagery as shown below:

Yeah, good luck realising what exactly you deleted by mistake.  No name, no way of finding out what the local PREVIOUSLY linked to.

I suggest retaining at least the name of the Control / Indicator the local was linked to so that the poor programmer (me) has some fighting change of undoing the error.  Bear in mind there could be many changes made to a VI before this kind of thing is notices so a simply "undo" fix could end up being VERY awkward indeed.

An example of how this could look:

Here I at least know WHAT I have deleted by mistake.

[PaulG.]

I think 99 undo steps works pretty well for correcting a mistake. I don't see how this is much better. I don't like LV leaving the garbage local on the block diagram as it is.

[Intaris]

Paul, try doing 99 undo steps after saving the VI........

[Darin.K]

What?  Don't you find the label of the local variable helpful? 

[AristosQueue (NI)]

> Paul, try doing 99 undo steps after saving the VI........

Works just fine in LV 2012. 🙂

[Intaris]

Really, undo is saved with the VI? This is news to me. Does it survive trips to a SVN server and back to a different machine?

[crossrulz]

No.  But in a recent version of LabVIEW (2011) it was added the capability to undo after a save.  Once the VI is closed, the undo buffer is gone.

http://forums.ni.com/t5/LabVIEW-Idea-Exchange/Enable-quot-Undo-quot-even-after-saving-the-VI/idi-p/9...

[fabric]

Often undo is not practical, either beacuse of what you have achieved in the meantime, or because the undo buffer has been cleared for some reason.

Either way, I like the idea but my kudos is conditional on it applying to references and property/invoke nodes as well... and possibly orphaned event cases.

[Darin.K]

> my kudos is conditional on it applying to references and property/invoke nodes as well

Unless I have been imagining things, references and implicit PNs are nuked when you delete the control.

I could see locals following suit, like PaulG mentioned.

[altenbach]

There are still plenty of operations that seems to clear the undo buffer, even in LV 2012. I would be lucky to ever get all 99 default entries filled!  "Think twice and wire once" is still my motto that I learned in LabVIEW 4.0 :D.

[fabric]

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@Darin.K wrote:

> my kudos is conditional on it applying to references and property/invoke nodes as well

Unless I have been imagining things, references and implicit PNs are nuked when you delete the control.

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Correct. And they are sometimes painful to reconstruct if their parent control goes missing for some reason. I'd like them to remain as ghosted shells, just like Intaris' locals.