How can we create our own custom wires?

[tarheel_hax0r]

We've got some ideas about some stuff we'd like to do, but to really pull it off correctly, it would require that we be able to create our own custom wires.

If we were to upgrade to the "Professional Development" version, would that give us the ability to create custom wires? Or is the ability to create custom wires the sort of thing that would require us to become some kind of an NI "Partner"? If so, who should we contact to inquire about such a thing?

And on a related note, we'd also like to be able to create our own custom terminals on the block diagram, so obviously the same questions would apply there, as well.

If anyone has any experience with this sort of thing, we'd love to get whatever advice you could offer.

Thanks!!!

PS: By the way, the link to the "Professional Development System" literature is currently broken:

http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/10440

[Dennis_Knutson]

The color and size of wires is fixed and cannot be changed. The same is true of the terminal patterns. You can only rotate them.

[tarheel_hax0r]

> The color and size of wires is fixed and cannot be changed. The same is true of the terminal patterns. You can only rotate them.

What we were hoping to do was a little more radical than that. Instead of having, say, a VI return an I32 output that gets sent over a wire to another VI's I32 input, we wanted to be able to have, ah, let's say, "stranger" kinds of things ["terminals"] travelling over "stranger" kinds of wires.

I suppose that's being a little vague, but I figure that if we ever wanted to sell this thing as a commercial product, then prudence would dictate that we keep our mouths shut [at least until we had a finished product that was worth selling].

For that matter, I can envision a product that would really benefit from having LabVIEW's IDE integrated as some sort of a submodule [much the way you can embed Internet Explorer's DHTML/DOM interpreter in a WIN32 application]. But for the time being, we'd be perfectly happy if there were some way we could create our own custom ["exotic"] wires.

[Enrique]

tarheel_hax0r;

Your description reminded me of what a variant can do. I am not that knowledgable about variants, so I might not be right.

There is this interesting presentation on variants from Mr. Drolet on Openg.org. It may be something to take a look at.

Enrique

[Bob_Y.]

Another option would be to use the GOOP toolkit. It does not create a custom wire, but it does let you encapsulate everything and pass a sort of reference to the encapsulated data. This gives you a unique wire to pass around. I think that this is what the report generation VIs use.

The toolkit is available from Endevo through this NI tutorial site.

While it is not exactly what you are looking for, it might get you something that you can work with.

Hope that this helps,
Bob Young

[tarheel_hax0r]

There is this interesting presentation on variants from Mr. Drolet on Openg.org. It may be something to take a look at.

Thanks for the link.

[tarheel_hax0r]

Another option would be to use the GOOP toolkit... The toolkit is available from Endevo through this NI tutorial site.

Thanks for the link.