LabVIEW Idea Exchange

NI's response to the ideas thus far appears far too sporadic. For example if you check out the top LabVIEW ideas (http://forums.ni.com/t5/ideas/v2/ideaexchangepage/blog-id/labviewideas/tab/most-kudoed) 7 of the top 10 ideas are still listed as new! Adding insult to injury the average age of these ideas to date is 1,017 days! It is ok to decline ideas but please provide us some indication that this is something you take seriously. It would appear that NI is cherry picking the easiest half dozen or so items from the list so you have a marketing gimmick to list on the LabVIEW release notes. I propose that a threshold is set and made public so that if an idea reaches a certain amount of kudos, R&D must address it, even if that means declining it.

Probes are so useful for debugging, but monitoring them within the Probe Watch window can be a headache. I constantly find myself focusing back and fourth between Probe Watch and the code to translate a probe number to a position in the code. A solution would be to have the probe's value float just above the probe itself. LabVIEW already has a similar feature. When you use Highligh Execution wire paths display their current vaules, but using Highlight Execution is too slow and no practical for every debug situation.

Here is the issue as it stands today:

Here is my proposed new feature! :

Many or most VIs that ship with LabVIEW have their protection set to Unlocked (no password). The screenshot below shows a selection of such VIs.

It would be much better if the protection of vi.lib VIs was set to "Locked (no password)", to prevent accidental modification.

It seems very risky for built-in VIs to be open to modification, especially to accidental modification.

Scenario 1: Developer A is developing an application on their machine which contains modified vi.lib VIs which were accidentally modified as part of work on previous projects. They build an application which passes validation and starts to be used in production. All of the developer's source code is committed to a source code repository. Developer A leaves the company. Six months later Developer B is asked to pull the code from the repository and add a minor improvement. The application behaves very differently when Developer B builds it on their machine. A long and complicated troubleshooting session later, Developer B concludes that the different behaviour was likely caused by modified vi.lib VIs on Developer A's machine. Developer B cannot be sure, because Developer A's machine was wiped when they left, so there is no way to unequivocally prove the conclusion.

Scenario 2: A team of developers builds a test system for a defence application. The code is completed, and the test system is put through a thorough  commissioning and validation process that involves testing dozens of known good units and known bad units. The validation process takes three weeks to complete. Management plans to not have to run the whole validation process for future minor changes. Instead they will ask the development team to perform code reviews and record notes for each minor change. Revalidation is not necessary if the code reviewers agree that the changes are non-functional, for example, the wording was changed in a dialogue message, or a logo was added to the UI. This sounds like a great plan, but is technically unsafe. Strictly speaking the whole revalidation process would have to be rerun, even for minor changes, due to the fact that not all of the source code is visible in the repository (there is uncontrolled source code in vi.lib that could have been modified in between builds).

Essentially I don't think it's safe for an app to contain source code that is not visible or tracked in a repository.

I can't think of a simple, quick solution to the concerns above, but having all vi.lib VIs set to "Locked (no password)" could be a quick first step towards reducing the likelihood of this issue. Developers would at least have to consciously edit vi.lib VIs, rather than doing it accidentally which can happen now. Of course, a malicious actor could still wreak havoc by editing a few inconspicuous vi.lib VIs.

The risk would be reduced further if the vi.lib VIs were password-protected. This would come at the expense of not being able to view the source code of native VIs, something which I find useful. Therefore, I personally would prefer "Locked (no password)" to password-protected, but I might prefer password-protected to unlocked.

Similar concerns apply to non-NI third-party libraries that install in vi.lib, user.lib or instr.lib, for example the extremely useful OpenG libraries. These too are examples of uncontrolled source code. For this reason some developers I worked with preferred to copy the OpenG and other libraries into the project repository (this involves a tedious job of opening each library VI and relinking it to the other library VIs in their new location).

This idea is similar but potentially easier to implement than the following idea: Make the VI's from the "vi.lib" Read-only - NI Community

Thanks

I have a rather large string indicator for displaying operator messages/alarms

and I would like to have the option for an automatic vertical center of the text,

so that all messages get displayed in the center of the screen (if too many lines, justify to top and display the scrollbar).

I also have a 2 line statusbar, but displaying a 1 line message that is not vertically centered, looks very strange.

The work-around I'm using now is to display the multiline string centered in a picturecontrol,

but I'm not a big fan of this fix because there are many boundary-conditions to keep in mind ...

Another annoyance is that to prevent selection of text in the indicator I often disable the indicator

(it looks unprofessional if an indicatortext can be selected in the GUI),

but if the displayed text is larger than the string indicator, the scrollbar is also disabled !?!? 

and therefore not controllable by the user

Just as for Clusters, I would like to be able to change a Map constant on the Block Diagram to be viewable as an Icon when it has been made a TypeDef.  You can't directly edit the constant data, so for me it doesn't make it worth the large amount of real estate that it can take up, especially if you have a Map of Maps/Sets.

So for example, instead of this:

I would like:

If I have a Control labelled '%s In', I would like to be able to right click on it and select Create Indicator, resulting in a terminal label of '%s Out'. Likewise, if I have an Indicator labelled '% Out', I would like to select Create Control and automatically label it '%s In'.

Simple enough, but one of those tiny little tweaks that would save me a tiny fraction of effort every time I do it 🙂

Hello,

I'm telling my strudents how they should use the error cluster and how important it is. In subvis no error dialogs should be shown and so on (see topics of LabVIEW Core 1 / Core 2).

But many VIs written by NI have been programmed very sloppy.

Example: VI "Write into spreadsheet file". The error cluster is not wired to the inputs/outputs and if an error occures, an error dialog would pop up. Here is the block diagram of your V "Write into spreadsheet file"I:

Please check all of your VIs and do a revision that we can make well-coded applications where the error handling will work correctly.

Regards

Can the the options on the data type Representation pallette be changed from grey to match the color of the numerical icons and terminals?

Thank You!

Melissa McQueen

Suppose you have a while loop containing a case state machine with several cases.  Then later you decide to add a shift register.  It's very time consuming to wire every case when you might need to alter the contents of the shift register in a single case.  So when adding the shift register and the user connects the SR wires to one case, auto connect all the other cases internally.