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Need custom column widths in Append Text Table to Report


Rob Hingle wrote:
 I urge the developers at NI to avoid these sorts of "improvements" in other toolkits, or they will all be completely useless for anything other than the handful of cookie-cutter applications for which they were designed.

I guess to some degree that's my point -- libraries of functions *are* only useful for the handful of situations for which they were designed. It's the Hobson's Choice of *any* design. Making any set of VIs do something it wasn't intended to do is sometimes easy, sometimes hard, but there's no way to guess how hard it will be at the outset. The particular change that you're wanting is now hard. I know for a fact that some other types of modifications are now drop dead simple but were impossible under the previous design.

 

Jeff K, inventor of LV, used to have a sign on his desk when I first started working at NI: "You know you have built something truly great when people use it for purposes it was never intended and then complain about it not working well for them." Any software library suffers from this problem -- it was built to do XYZ and because everyone loves how well it does XYZ, when they need to do WXYZ, they expect it to work -- it's sooooo close, they can taste it. Trust me -- there's some Microsoft APIs out there that I have thought, oh, if only they'd added this one extra parameter, this one extra function... As far as LabVIEW is concerned, my thought has generally been, "Well, at least its in VIs so I can make the change, even if it is hard, whereas with C++ libraries, I generally don't have the source code so I'm stuck." 

 

I don't have any good answers to this problem -- I don't think software can be made flexible to be easily adaptable to all possible user desires. The best I can say is that if you have particular desires for added functionality/flexibility then post them here or (better) on the LV Idea Exchange so that they may get incorporated into future designs. If you have ideas for solving the general issue of software flexibility, please post those too. 

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Just fallen foul of this myself I need to set different column widths in a report and was trying to apply the same fix

how about either making a version of the write to table with a column width array input or making a more flexible toolkit for building tables in reports (or on screen)

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Late reply to this, but I hope I can help someone with the same issue.

 

If you change the default value of "column width (1)" to -1 in "NI_report.lvclass:Append Text Table to Report (wrap).vi", it will skip the column-editting case structure found in "NI_ReportGenerationToolkit.lvlib:Excel_Insert_Table.vi".  This means that you can print with the column widths saved in your Excel file, rather than LabVIEW changing them all to a constant width.

 

VI  Heirarchy:

NI_Report_GenerationToolkit.lvlib:Excel Easy Table (str).vi

NI_report.lvclass:Append Text Table to Report (wrap).vi

NI_Excel.lvclass:Append Text Table to Report.vi

NI_ReportGenerationToolkit.lvlib:Excel_Insert_Table.vi

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