inherited code that has the terminals all placed as icons

[m3rl3n]

IMHO, the stupidest thing that we deal with in LabView is neophytes creating programs and using terminals placed as icons. Space on a diagram is already at a premium....  Anyway, off my soapbox.  I have inherited code from a person who has used "View as Icon" terminals ALL OVER the diagrams. Our standard is to not do that and rather than click on EVERY SINGLE terminal (there are a lot), is there anyway that I can do a mass property change of all the terminals so they are not viewed as icons?

Note to NI....  get rid of that option. However, I am not opposed if some can tell me a good reason for maintaining that option and having large icons all over the place that to the uninitiated are easily confused with the similarly sized sub-vis.

Thanks.

[tbob]

I could not agree more that View as Icons is a stupid idea.  What a clutter!  Lots of wasted space.  I too have inherited code as such, and the first thing I do is to click on every single icon and change the view.  I am interested in a better solution as well.  Note to NI: please get rid of this option, or at least don't make it the default.

[Darren]

I don't like View as Icon either.  As such, I have sympathy for you guys.  Here's a VI I wrote that will find all the VIs in a given folder (and all its subfolders) and turn the terminals on their diagrams to non-icon view.  I tested the VI in 8.0, 8.2, and 8.5 and it seems to work well.

Disclaimer:  This VI will modify your VIs (by changing their terminal views) and save them in the LabVIEW version you are running (8.0 or later).  Please back up all the VIs in the folder you specify before running this utility.

-D

P.S. - The VI is password-protected because it uses some internal LabVIEW functionality to change the view type on terminals. 

[m3rl3n]

Darren,

 You just won my greatest person of the year award.  Thank you.  I will try your code in a little while and followup on the results.

Thanks.

[altenbach]

Cool tool Darren!

I like the icon! Did you make this on halloween?

Personally I would prefer something a little bit less radical than "...everything in folder and subfolders...". How about something that can be placed in the menu which then would apply the action to the current VI only? 🙂

[tst]

I don't like the icon view either, but I can think of some reasons for it:

• It might make life easier for beginners (which is probably why it's on by default).
• I know that some people prefer recognizing their controls by its type than by its label.
• For typedefs, it gives you the typedef icon, which is useful.

[Darren]

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altenbach wrote:

Personally I would prefer something a little bit less radical than "...everything in folder and subfolders...". How about something that can be placed in the menu which then would apply the action to the current VI only?

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The original poster sounded like he needed something that would be a one-shot fix for everything in his hierarchy.  For those of you who wish to write your own tool to do this, here is a subVI you can call that takes in a VI reference and performs the non-icon view conversion on that VI.  It has a boolean input to specify whether or not you want to save the VI after the conversion.  Saved in 8.0.

-D

[Graziano]

Nice post!
   I think that stacked sequence structure is a much more harmful feature of LabView, that should be removed  ..... of course, it's just my opinion!

graziano

[altenbach]

Thanks! 🙂

[tst]

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Graziano wrote:
   I think that stacked sequence structure is a much more harmful feature of LabView, that should be removed 

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Sounds to me like you need a stacked sequence exterminator.