I'm in the final stages of finishing my first real VI for actual use (it's been an interesting experience, honestly most of what I've learned has been from this forum so thanks!) and I'm considering how to best comment and annotate what I have to make it readable and understandable for any future developers. As I said, I'm very new at this and I don't want to ruin some developers life in a year or two by having bad code. Some specific questions: Variable Names: In text based programming you'd try to keep your variable names logical and informative to make reading code easier. From what I've learned the wires can be labeled or named, and serve a similar role. How do you decide which wires are important to label, and which should be left? Are there any good general practices on how to name them (and specifically, do you just use the label thing or are there better ways)? Same questions for shift registers, etc. Text Boxes: Text based code would have comments to describe the purpose of functions, the operations being done, etc. I could put text boxes around the block diagram, but is there a better way? Non-visible parameters: One of the things that's been hard for me while learning LabVIEW was how many properties and parameters of objects are not defined programatically by default. For example, unless you set up something to do this specifically, an XY graph has dozens of properties defined only in the context window, some of which are important (loose scaling, stuff like that). First off, am I doing things wrong if this is the case, and second is there any way to give some sort of commenting on those properties? Any other ideas: any other things you commonly see people mess up, or things that bug you when you read other people's VI's? How much should I try to make subVI's of parts of a large VI? things like that. Thanks for any advice, and thanks to the forum guys in general! I don't love labVIEW but this is the most helpful software forum I've participated in.

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LabVIEW

What are some good tips and advice for effective commenting on a VI?

@BertMcMahan wrote:

@billko wrote:

You might not think of wires as being documentation, but if, like others have said, your wires are neat and well-organized, it will be easy to follow them and you won't have guess where they are coming from/going to.

Neat wires is the LabVIEW equivalent of neat whitespacing in text-based languages. Imagine if you got someones code that had literally no indents, or even just random indents... how hard would that be to read, even if it functioned? (not Python, of course) You'd need to fix whitespace before you could begin to work on the code.

That's how it is with messy wires in LabVIEW.

if val>13

val = 2;

else if val>100

val++;

endif

That's actually my favorite way of explaining it. Nice.

Bill

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