Block diagram symbol cheatsheet?

[maherhome]

Is there a block diagram symbol cheatsheet somewhere?

I'm a novice and the most frustrating thing for me is the myriad of icons representing variables and their different "types".  I don't mean u16, fixed point, etc., as is depicted here.  I mean shared variables, rings, and other things I don't quite understand yet.  Case in point is the attached image from the FOC FPGA example (that I'll need to use).  

The context help mechanism doesn't help.

Thanks,

Steve

[crossrulz]

I don't know about a cheat sheet.  But here's a few quick descriptions.

A house indicates a local variable

A globe indicates a global variable

Your constant there is a type def (triangle in corner).  I can't really say it is a ring or an enum without seeing the context help or opening the type def.

[User002]

I found one reference here, by googling.  

http://www.princeton.edu/~mae224/labmanual/labviewreference.pdf

Aside from that, I don't know of a cheatsheet at this point.

[johnsold]

Some years ago LV came with a cheat sheet.  It was probably in the LV3 or LV4 era.  The link Andrew posted looks a lot like part of the manuals from one of the older versions.

The LV3 manuals were one of the best set of software manuals ever published.

Lynn

[maherhome]

Thanks for googling, but it also doesn't show global and local variables ... and who know's what else I don't know about 😛

It would be nice if the context help were enhanced to include that information.  That context help is a beautiful thing for a novice, but sometimes falls a tad short.  Another funny one is when hovering over a "free label" the context help completely ignores the label (which I honestly didn't know what it was) and instead describes the surrounding structure (e.g. while loop).

Steve

[User002]

That is some excellent feedback.  You should consider putting that here on the Idea Exchange.

[maherhome]

Done.

[Mark_Yedinak]

Well, I don't consider a bad thing that the help is light regarding local and global variables. For a novice I would recommend not to use either. Learn how to use data flow effectively. A mistake many novice make is to use lots of global/local variables and end up running into lots of race conditions. Learn how to use data flow correctly and there is very little need for variables.

I realize this doesn't address your original question regarding the cheat sheet but it nevertheless is sound advice for a beginner in LabVIEW.

[maherhome]

Mark,

I appreciate your experience and have already steered clear of local and global variables after reading other material, but I think the context help should at least identify the construct being used.  I shouldn't have to post to a forum to understand what a symbol represents.

Steve

[Mark_Yedinak]

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@maherhome wrote:

Mark,

I appreciate your experience and have already steered clear of local and global variables after reading other material, but I think the context help should at least identify the construct being used.  I shouldn't have to post to a forum to understand what a symbol represents.

Steve

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I agree that the help file should contain more information. My comment was more sarcastic than literal. The advice however was given in good faith.