LabVIEW Idea Exchange

Problem: There are currently two ways of moving or transferring a VI or CTL from one lvlib or lvclass to another (or from having no owner to having an owner).

Method 1: Drag-and-Drop. Select the VI or CTL, drag to desired lvlib or lvclass, drop in desired location.

• This works well in small to medium projects, and will probably remain the quickest and most common way of moving a item from one owner to another.
• This does not work well in large projects, which can have dozens or hundreds of classes and libraries, sometimes deeply nested within complex virtual folder structures (for good reason). In this situation dragging the item can take a long time, especially when the destination lvlib or lvclass is "off the screen" and slowly scrolling through the project becomes necessary. This is done by hovering the mouse in just the right region in the top or bottom of the Project Explorer. This can be tedious and wastes time.

Method 2: Remove and Re-add. Select the VI or CTL, remove it from its current owner by right-click >> "Remove from Library" or by pressing Delete key, select destination lvlib or lvclass, right-click >> Add >> File... , then select the file on disk (this last step can take time in large projects with large folder structures).

• This can be quicker than method 1 in large projects.
• This method is technically a workaround. It does not directly transfer ownership of the item.

Note: Both methods usually now also require moving the file on disk to the new owner's folder location. This can be done using the Project Explorer Files view, but is an additional step that takes time. It's also possible to simply forget to move the file on disk (best practice is not encouraged). 

Solution:

• Right-click the VI or CTL, select Move to... option
• A window appears. This window may use a Combo Box or a Listbox to display a list of all the lvlibs and lvclasses available in the project.
• The user selects the desired destination owner and presses OK.
• The item is moved to the destination library.

Nice-to-haves

• The Move to... window may contain buttons or other mechanisms (e.g. clickable datagrid headers) that enable the user to sort the libraries and classes in the project by name in alphabetical or inverse alphabetical order, and to filter: display only lvlibs, display only classes.
• When the selected VI or CTL is initially part of a lvlib or lvclass, that owner will be omitted from the list displayed in the Move to... window.
• The Move to... window could contain a tickbox named "Also move on disk to new owner's folder?" or similar. When this is ticked, the item is also moved on disk to the folder of the new owner. This would remove the need to use the Files view to move the item on disk (would save time) and would help encourage a best practice (member items should be located in the same folder as their owner).
• The Move to... option should be available when multiple items are selected. The items may initially be owned by the same owner, or may be owned by different initial owners.

This idea is inspired by the "Project Explorer "Move to Owner Folder" option in Files view" idea.

Big clusters that go beyond the limit of the FP are annoying, especially to resize them automatically and reorder the controls.

Here are a couple of improvements that could be made:

• "Reorder controls in cluster..."
  • Allow user to scroll while re-ordering the controls to have access to all elements instead of having to do it in multiple time.
  • Shortcuts like Escape and Enter should respectively cancel-exit and validate-exit the reordering phase
    These are pretty standard shortcuts and already widely used within the Labview environment
• "Autosizing"
  • Autosize to "Compact". Where instead of aligning all element vertically or horizontally only, they would be in the "most compact" (to be defined) possible configuration to simplify the access to all info in the cluster.
    For instance compacted in a square way, sorted by class (Booleans/numerics/strings etc.)
    I understand that this one might be more complex, but it would be really helpful in my opinion
    
  • Less important (to me): In Edit Mode, in case a cluster is autosized to "none" and some items are hidden outside for whatever reason, the developer should be notified somehow. For instance the same way than for strings 
    
  • (In the same case than above, allowing scroll bars could be interesting in some situations.)

-Vincent.

Suppose a front panel contains the three elements seen below, with the first one being selected.

In the situation above currently pressing Tab does nothing. It would be useful if, instead, pressing Tab would cycle the element selection to the next element in the tabbing order, as seen below.

If Tab was pressed again, it would cycle to the next element in the tabbing order, as seen below. And so on.

Notes

• This idea would speed up development by enabling us to cycle through element selection without using the mouse.
• When used in conjunction with the F2 idea, this would enable us to use Tab + F2 combinations to quickly cycle through elements and rename their labels and/or captions.
• This idea could be extended to terminals on the block diagram. Suppose a terminal is selected on the block diagram, pressing tab would navigate to another terminal on the block diagram.
• I'm aware that currently it is possible to use Tab or Shift+Tab to cycle between elements forwards or backwards when the VI is in Run Mode (Ctrl + M). While that is useful, this idea asks for more.

Thanks!

The asterisk (*) that LabVIEW automatically places in the title bar when a file is modified should be placed first not last so that it can be seen when the window is too narrow to display the whole string, e.g. where other programs like Notepad.exe put it when then text truncation is indicated by an ellipsis (...). Some titles can be much longer when they include lvlib and lvclass contexts.

History probes are a very useful tool in LabVIEW. However, one improvement can be made to them when working with enums. Currently, the values in enum history probes are returned as numbers, as shown in the picture below:

It would even be more useful if enum history probes returned values in terms of the enum item names rather than the numeric values associated with them, as shown in the picture below.

As the number of classes in a project increases it gets harder and  harder to figure out which methods in a class are overridden because you need to scroll up and down to compare the methods listed under each class. A distinctive glyph or icon in the project explorer window would be very helpful. I understand that there are workarounds like creating an override virtual folder and moving the overridden vis inside it or right clicking the class and opening the "VI for Override" window and checking if the vi is listed. However, a distinctive icon would drastically increase code readability.

The following code will essentially do what I want, but I want this to be natively incorporated into the IDE as an option.

90%+ of the VIs that I write have a front panel that doesn't get shown to the end user, and yet, whenever you open a VI what does it show you? The front panel. I think the default behavior of opening a VI should be to show the block diagram ONLY. This would have several advantages for the developer:

1. Fewer windows to manage - Even if you minimize the front panel, you can still accidentally restore the FP when you Alt-Tab or click in the taskbar which brings me to...
2. Less clutter in the taskbar - Once you open more than a couple VIs, navigating to the block diagram of the VI you want in the taskbar becomes very unwieldy.
3. You could more easily get to the BD of VIs running in a subpanel.
4. It would be possible to get to the BD of a VI that has a custom run-time menu where Ctrl-E is disabled.

Ideally this would be an option in the Tools --> Options dialog (that I would always turn on).

This idea is similar to one posted almost 15 years ago, but I don't consider this a duplicate because this takes things a step further by not opening the FP at all.