Darren's Weekly Nugget 2/13/2006

[Darren]

A couple of tips about front panel arrays this week.  If you've got an array on the front panel, and you want to quickly see how many elements are in it, you can right-click on the array and choose Advanced > Show Last Element, and the array index will automatically switch to display the last element in the array.  Before I knew this trick I remember using the arrow keys in the array index control to increase the array index by 1000s, 100s, 10s, and 1s until I found the last element in the array.

And if you're using LabVIEW 8.0, you've got the immensely helpful new feature of scrollbars on arrays.  Just right-click the array and choose Visible Items > Vertical (and/or Horizontal) Scrollbar and you can very easily scroll the array contents until you find the last element (or whatever other element you're looking for).

-D

[TiTou]

Thanks for this Darren,

I'm still using LV 7.1 but looking forward to upgrade.
The scrollbar on arrays has been on the wish list for a couple of year and I didn't know trick you mentioned for LV 7, so thanks again 😉

[altenbach]

Very cool.  I wasn't aware of the "last element" trick and could have really used it just yesterday.

Learned something new! 😄

[Robst]

Hello:

Hey Darren, me and my mouse are grateful with you (I think my mouse is the most grateful). Now I won't have to click the Array Index Control N times to see the size of my arrays. My mouse will last much more time and it would suffer less!

Thanks!

[Darren]

Glad I could help...also remember that you can increment any numeric control (including the array index) by clicking inside the numeric and using the arrow keys to increase/decrease whatever digit you are next to...this is a quick way to increment/decrement a numeric control by a factor other than the ones digit.  And you can use the left/right arrows to change which digit you are incrementing/decrementing.

-D

[johnsold]

Darren,

I have used that for years. If the array is large (10,000 elements or more) the index display is too small to show how many elements there are. Could the default size be made larger or resize the index display when Show Last Element in selected and the value is too big for the display?

Lynn

[Darren]

Hi Lynn,

That's a good suggestion.  I'll file a suggestion against the product and maybe we'll see the "autosized array index" feature in a future version of LabVIEW... 🙂

-D

[falkpl]

Scroll bars on the arrays!  I think this will get me yo upgrade asap.  I heve even wrote this code in the past I wanted it so bad (really made the code look much uglier).  This should be a main bullet point in the whats new in LV 8.0 (I havent seen this mentioned yet).  Thanks for the weekly tips, keep ut the great work.

[Henrik_Volkers]

Thanks for the nugget Darren

the customized array control made it's way to 8.0

Just to mention: For the numeric controls you can also press the shift key to speed up the increase rate of the arrows

[RVallieu]

I have to agree with this suggestion - it would be very nice to have this feature (autosize array index).

Message Edited by RVallieu on 02-28-2006 12:28 PM