Darren's Weekly Nugget 08/02/2010

[Darren]

Just in time for NI Week, LabVIEW 2010 has released!  Over the next several weeks, my weekly nuggets will highlight some of my favorite features in LabVIEW 2010.

Cool LabVIEW 2010 Features Part I:  Replace and Insert with Quick Drop

Soon after I released Quick Drop with LabVIEW 8.6, one of the first requests was the ability to do Replace and Insert operations with Quick Drop instead of the palettes.  Well, it took a few releases, but we finally got it:

Replace with Quick Drop

Select one or more diagram objects, press Ctrl-Space to bring up Quick Drop, type a palette object name (or a project item if you have one or more LabVIEW projects open), press Ctrl-P, and all the objects you had selected on the diagram will be replaced with the object name you specified in Quick Drop.  And yes, it does do the replace "correctly" with Compound Arithmetic... 🙂

Insert with Quick Drop

Select one or more diagram wires, press Ctrl-Space to bring up Quick Drop, type a palette object name (or a project item if you have one or more LabVIEW projects open), press Ctrl-I, and a separate instance of the object you specified in Quick Drop will be inserted on each wire.  I also included special functionality when Ctrl-Shift-I is pressed.  I call this "Smart Insert".  With Smart Insert, a *single instance* of the object name you specify will be inserted on multiple wires.  As an example, if you select a refnum wire and an error wire, press Ctrl-Space, type "Property Node", and press Ctrl-Shift-I, a *single* property node will be inserted on both the error wire and the refnum wire.

[LabBEAN]

Yes!  This was the first comment a colleague made when he first used QD.  Nice work Darren!  (... also like the implementation of Ctrl-Shift for multiple wires)

[Thoric]

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I call this "Smart Insert".  With Smart Insert, a *single instance* of the object name you specify will be inserted on multiple wires.  As an example, if you select a refnum wire and an error wire, press Ctrl-Space, type "Property Node", and press Ctrl-Shift-I, a *single* property node will be inserted on both the error wire and the refnum wire.

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AWESOMENESS!! I bow to thee o' Deity.

This alone is enough reason to upgrade to LV 2010

[tbob]

I am truly amazed.   I was very slow warming up to Quick Drop, but now I'm going full speed ahead with these new and very useful features.

[KarstenT]

I am having a problem with the Insert functionality. 

If a wire braches into several paths, and I click on a downstream one and then try to QD Insert a VI, the dropped VI always ends up on the main shared wire instead of the specific branch that I have selected.

Is there any way around this?

[Darren]

As discussed in this thread, Quick Drop Insert doesn't work properly on a selected segment of a forked wire.  I'm looking into ways to fix it.

[X.]

I would argue that the expected behavior for Ctrl-Space....Select....Ctrl-P for the 1/x function replaced by a Compound Arithmetic should be:

=====> 

not what it currently is:

====> 

This, BTW, is what the "Replace" menu does, so there is no benefit really in using the Ctrl-HyperSpace projection (at least to me).

And similarly for (-x) and x^2.

[KarstenT]

If desired, you could alter the behavior of the Replace.vi plugin to handle the Reciprocal properly (choose Multiply mode, invert the input, resize for one terminal, adjust position to center the new node).

I've attached a hasty example of what I mean.

[KarstenT]

Attached is an even better version that eliminates the subVI.

Backup the version of "Replace.vi" that you have at C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2013\resource\dialog\QuickDrop\plugins and replace it with this version.

[X.]

I am not into replacing chunks myself. I'll leave it to the professionals.

BTW, there are a few more potential improvements posted here.