Theres something really wrong with Clean Up Diagram

[DEppAtNGC]

There appears to be some significant problems with the Clean Up Diagram algorithm. It seems that far too much space is padded next to cluster unbundle by name and structure objects. It is really frustrating that some things appear miles apart and others are far too close. I have done a very good job of factoring this application into VIs but the inconsistency around certain objects makes it look terrible.

Help! I can't read it!

PS: Prior to now I have been careful not to perform a Clean Up Diagram on the vi containing a case with a large number of sub cases.

[GerdW]

Hi,

maybe you should start programming "nice" from the beginning

The cleanup is quite nice after opening old or other peoples code, but not intended to let do your programming against styleguide! And it already does a good job as I tested on some of my first (oldest) vis...

Look here what one of the NI engineers writes about cleanup...

Message Edited by GerdW on 03-05-2009 08:13 PM

[hecmar.arreola]

Don't you just love it when people post a non-helpful response to your current problem.... *sigh*

There are some options for tweaking the "Clean-Up" feature.  I have had mixed results with it before.  It is still a really new feature, and hopefully newer LabVIEW versions will impliment a much more useful Clean-Up feature.  I've had fairly nice looking block diagrams that were made a mess of with the Clean-Up function.  I've also had the Clean-Up function really improve the readability.

So try tweaking the options, and if that doesn't work spend some time cleaning things up yourself is really the only solution.  We're programmers, not artist, and I for one feel your pain when programming in LabVIEW seems prone to speghetti code.  I had a much easier time keeping my written code organized.  Like most things, practice makes perfect.

I wish the Clean-Up function would only attempt to clean-up the selected objects as oppose to the whole diagram somtimes.

[DEppAtNGC]

I have tried numerous manual cleanup configuration settings, and auto too. There are some serious problems with the algorithm. As for the feature being "new", it's NOT new. VEE-Test in the 90's was better at auto-routing... There are some problems in the way it figures out how close items may be placed horizontally...

GET THIS FIXED!!!

[jon_mcbee]

I have heard mutterings that in a future release you will be able to select a portion of code before applying the clean up tool... Until then, LabVIEW has another great built in function: ctrl+Z

Message Edited by jmcbee on 03-05-2009 01:00 PM

[altenbach]

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DEppAtNGC wrote:

As for the feature being "new", it's NOT new.

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Diagram Cleanup was introduced with LabVIEW 8.6 last August. Since this is the latest major version it is a new feature by any reasonable definition.

I agree that it is not great to be used on excellent code. So far it seems to bring the diagram quality somewhere in the neighborhood of the 70 percentile on my scale (wild guess!). It does a great job on horrible diagrams (it lifts them from very low score), but makes any of my own diagrams worse (they go from the 99 percentile down to 70). 😄 Don't expect miracles. I never use it on my own code, but it helped me to make some sense out of nightmare code posted here in the forum.. 😉

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DEppAtNGC wrote:

GET THIS FIXED!!!

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Well, NI is always eager for product feedback, so if you have detailed and constructive ideas about how to improve the cleanup tool, please let them know via the product suggestion center. If possible, include some typical diagrams and describe what's wrong with the current outcome and how you want the results to look like instead. Good luck!

[Chris_VH]

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jmcbee wrote:
I have heard mutterings that in a future release you will be able to select a portion of code before applying the clean up tool... Until then, LabVIEW has another great built in function: ctrl+Z

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Mutterings, what mutterings!?!

Sure would be nice though... 🙂

[CMal]

Here's some discussion about block diagram cleanup that you might find interesting:

http://labviewartisan.blogspot.com/2009/03/good-use-for-block-diagram-cleanup.html