Curious George: When you include a caption with your control or indicator, is it more explicit or less explicit than the label? (And why?)

[billko]

Put another way, are your labels more informative than your captions, or the other way 'round?

I've waffled a bit between the two, and I'd like to hear some opinions.  Thanks!

[RTSLVU]

I only use captions when I want the front panel to say something different than the label on the block diagram.

For instance an indicator on the front panel might have a caption that says "Output Voltage" but on the block diagram the terminal might be simply labeled "Vout"

[RavensFan]

I'll show a caption if I want some additional text.  So Voltage as a label for the indicator, but V or VDC if I want to put units to the right of the indicator.

Also, use a caption and no label if you want the "label" of the control/indicator to be changeable programmatically for the case of foreign languages.

What you describe as having a more descriptive caption to show on the front panel seems valid.  Though if I need that much additional description, I'll put it in as a tool tip

[JÞB]

There are several use cases for captions and why I use them determines what I what them to show.  Here are a few.

1. To express Units on numerics as Ravens Fan suggests.  I don't do this anymore it is a Bad Bad in my newer thinking since the caption trumps the Help window.  My Practice is format the numeric display e.g. "%0.2f mVrms"
2. To permit localization. Caption is the same as Label in development native language
3. Documentation Label is likely the same as a Channel or signal name from system documentation Caption is a user friendly term Tip strip adds amplification.  EG Boolean control LabelMod1DO1.1, Caption Open Tip Press to control door Description True open the door False Closes it  Caption shown on FP
4. BD Simplification a la RSTLVU eg label Excitation Voltage Caption Vex Label shown on FP

There is no "Right answer"

[rolfk]

Jeff basically listed the possible reasons.

For me I use Captions for two reasons really:

- multilanguage UIs, Captions can be changed at runtime, Labels not! In that case the English Caption is usually the same as the Label. But multilanguage UIs are generally a big hassle to maintain, so I only do them if the customer requires them and is willing to pay for the considerable extra effort.

- Wanting to have verbose descriptions on the front panel but not wanting to have the label on the diagram terminal cover half of the screen. (I hate diagram terminals without a visible label like the pest).

[alexderjuengere]

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@rolfk wrote: Captions can be changed at runtime, Labels not! I

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Besides the multilingual aspect,

I have used the write caption.text property in combination with XY Graphs to programmatically create a heading

https://knowledge.ni.com/KnowledgeArticleDetails?id=kA00Z0000019KbOSAU

[billko]

First of all, Kudos for everyone who answered up to now.  I've done all of the above at various points in my "illustrious" career as a LabVIEW developer.  I was hoping to strive for some consistency in my usage, but can see that you can use them in so many productive ways that it doesn't pay to be try to be consistent at such a high level.

I do see where you can be consistent at a lower level, such as when you use each technique, so people can anticipate what you are trying to do.  (Just as, when I write documents, I try to use the same phrasing for similar meanings so people can concentrate on the content instead of what I'm trying to say.)

Thanks, this was as interesting a topic as I thought it would be.  And actually I thought it was going to be pretty interesting.  🙂

Thanks, all!

[stevem181]

I have a system where I change the captions on the host PC based on which one of two possible cRIOs are connected.

For example, a pressure sensor indicator label is PT-1X1. The caption (visible) will be set to either PT-111 or PT-121 based on the chassis ID of the cRIO. 

The modules and code are identical on the cRIOs, the difference is in scaling (large pumps vs small pumps).

The customer suggested having two UIs, but I wanted to avoid maintaining two essentially identical, complex, and changing UIs.

steve

[wiebe@CARYA]

I use labels formatted as section_tag to get the values automatically from config files. The user wants to see something else (maybe even depending on a language setting), so that's what the caption is for.