LabVIEW Idea Exchange

It would be useful if a "Keep Text Only" (a.k.a. "Paste Values" or "Use Destination Style") option existed when pasting text into control and indicator labels, captions, or values.

Example

Screenshot 1: A GUI element (control or indicator) with a custom, non-default label and value (contents) font style.

Screenshot 2: The text "Hello World" was copied (Ctrl + C) from Notepad and pasted (Ctrl + V) in the middle of the label. The newly pasted text is inserted using the default font (Application Font, 15 pt, black). There is no option to paste using the destination font style. The developer now has to waste a few seconds reconfiguring the font. The same result is obtained whenever the text is copied from an external (non-LabVIEW) application, regardless of the application (Notepad, Microsoft Word, Excel).

Screenshot 3: The same situation occurs when pasting into a string indicator.

Screenshot 4: In Microsoft Word, it is possible to select the "Keep Text Only" option when pasting text. In the screenshot below, notice how "Hello World" text from the second row obeys the destination style when it is pasted into the first row. A similar functionality exists in Microsoft Excel and is named "Paste Values".

Notes

• The current behaviour, where the text is pasted using the default font style, can be useful in many (maybe most) situations. I am not asking for the current behaviour to be removed. But it would be useful to have the option to select between the two behaviours.
• When the text is copied from LabVIEW, the pasted text maintains its source formatting style. This can be useful, but again, it would be useful to be able to select "Keep Text Only" (a.k.a. "Paste Values" or "Use Destination Style").

Thanks!

Some very useful properties for UI manipulation on graphs and charts do not exist. This makes it impossible to make very dynamic UI's with variable number of plots or dynamic resizing in panels.

It is possible to set Legend.number of plots and Legend position. It is not possible to set:

Graph palette, scale legend or cursor legend position. This makes resizing graphs very limiting.   

Further, it is possible to programmatically create a custom legend.  However it is not possible with cursors because there is no property available to get the current cursor values. Please can we have cursor.values[] and cursor.legend.number of rows

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.

The help page, that is supposed to provide a starting point for the developers on creating readable, high quality code in LabVIEW seems to be unchanged for quite some time: LabVIEW Style Checklist - NI.

At different workplaces (including NI) and different teams I have seen different implementations of such guides, many of which included extra "rules".

One such example is the file naming convention:

• Using spaces for separating words.
• Using Libraries to namespace VIs instead of including the noun in every related VI.

These are the most prominent examples I can come up with from the top of my head, but I'm sure that there are more.

I'm curious if an updated version exists somewhere that could be used to replace the above refenced help page?

If there is not, then I think could we collect some ideas here for updating this document.