Standard Bookmark Tags

[billko]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

Okay finally got around to making a first attempt at this.  Attached is a set of VIs that are intended to be invoked from the tools menu, but may work if it is just ran, saved in 2014.  Be aware that because this is invoked from the tools menu the main VI Bookmark Maker Dialog.vi is set to run when opened.  CTRL+. still aborts if you want to see the source.

The included VIs has the ability to scan open VIs or projects for existing bookmarks, and then adds them to the list of bookmarks to make.  There are several that exist without scanning a project, things like todo, question, note, etc., each with a short description of when they should be used.  A couple of them will prompt the user for more input like the Covers, and Software Version information.  Select the bookmarks to make, and click OK.  Then the text for the bookmark will be placed in the clipboard.

I attempted a couple solutions like placing the comment on the cursor like quickdrop does, but this function has a bug in it that I made NI aware of.  I also tried placing the comment in the clipboard instead of the comment text, but this doesn't seem to work right when invoked from the tools menu for some reason.  This code still exists but is commented out.

A few things I haven't done yet but thought about, is the ability to remember previously scanned bookmarks.  So if you scan a project and it adds several, when this dialog is closed it could remember these project based ones instead of having to scan again.

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Sounds really neat!  I should - ahem - bookmark this topic.  😄

[Hooovahh]

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@billko wrote:

Sounds really neat!  I should - ahem - bookmark this topic.  😄 

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While I know this is meant to be a joke (and a good one) you are welcome to use the forums Tag feature to categorize posts like this.  Any other feedback is welcome.  I'm not sure I'll start using this tool regularly but even if I don't someone else might.

[billko]

I'm going to poke around and see how I can use this.  It would be nice if we had some kind of standard approach that could become part of LabVIEW "best practices".  🙂

[Dhakkan]

@Hooovahh: Thanks for pointing me to this thread from LAVA.

Hello All,

Labeling requirement IDs or equivalents in the source code begs the question - how would future changes to code impact the labels? (Future changes could be due to tracked bug fixes, feature enhancements, feature retirements, etc.) If such code is manipulated often by an Agile team, source code could be littered with such labels; unless a process is developed to remove old labels without adversely affecting traceability of the old requirements.

Personally, I steer clear of putting such labels in individual code modules. Instead, these requirement IDs are tagged in the SCM (source code management) tool. This also encompasses the situation where a specific requirement is actually satisfied by changes to not one, but multiple code modules.

As I posted in the LAVA thread, I keep a minimal set of hashtags. This keeps the documentation burden on the Developer in check, while offering to clarify any esoteric implementations. The built-in NI Bookmarks Manager is sufficient for my needs then. In any case, I'll download and check out the tool provided in this subject thread.

NI's Requirements Gateway in intriguing. (Probably needs to be a New Year's resolution for me to check...)

[Hooovahh]

Oh yeah this is by no means meant to help everyone.  It was meant to help just one...me!  But I can see that some way to get a list of tags being used, and list of standard ones with specific comments about what they are used for, could help developers use them more.  If you look at the source I think I made it relativly easy to add your own tags, remove the ones there or make customizations that fit your work flow more.

[Dhakkan]

Hello Hooovahh,

My apologies if my last post came across as condescending. (When I re-read it, it seemed so, esp. the paragraph ending with checking out the tool you developed. Sorry about that.) I am merely curious about the tool, and therefore mentioned the 'in any case...'.

No hard feelings?

[Hooovahh]

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@Dhakkan wrote:

No hard feelings?

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None, taken.  What you said is true, and different people can use the bookmark manager in different ways (or not at all) and I was more or less just justifying the reasoning for what I did.  I was mostly trying to answer the question "how would future changes to code impact the labels?" with the statement that most represents a shugging of the sholders, because that wasn't the problem I was trying to solve with this.

Now that I think about it this should be an NI emoji, I guess this one will have to do. 

Edit: oh better yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Yamaeda]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

When bookmarks first came out, I remember them being demonstrated and it was mentioned that bookmarks could be used to find parts of the code that are important.  Has anyone used bookmarks this way?

The example he came up with was that with a large scale system  you may have multiple layers of software and finding exactly where the code does something like log to disk, might be hard to find, and you could put a #Logging to find where the logging is happening.  I thought that was a neat idea until I realized, software that is structured into actors should be relatively easy to follow, and finding where the code does the logging shouldn't take too much time if it is well structured.

Was this just a silly use of the bookmark, or does anyone use bookmarks to find parts of the code instead of needing to traverse down subVIs, or useing the project?

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Trying to get some understanding of a 15 year old project and probably as many developers i've used it in this way. As such i missed the ability to group bookmarks according to bookmark ... (from memory, i'm not working at it right now)

It also lessed the Shuffling window-harass LV likes to do, as it gave me a chance of going back, if i had time and remembered to bookmark something.

/Y