From Friday, April 19th (11:00 PM CDT) through Saturday, April 20th (2:00 PM CDT), 2024, ni.com will undergo system upgrades that may result in temporary service interruption.
We appreciate your patience as we improve our online experience.
So this may be a really, really simple question, but I am having trouble understanding something. I was curious what a turqoise wire is, so I did some reading and found out it is for a refnum. But, I cannot find out what a refnum actually is. I think it is a link to a specific control on the front panel, but then why use a reference instead of a property node, or even wire the control directly to a desired output?
There are many uses for control references. For example you could feed the refnum of a control to a subVI and change some property of the control there (e.g. value, color, boolean text, etc.).
The list of possible flavors of refnums is large. Here's a list. (Look for some typical uses in the description for each entry).