Example Style Guidelines - LV Add-ons

[Darren]

These are the style guidelines that National Instruments follows for LabVIEW examples that ship with NI products. By following these guidelines, the examples for your LabVIEW Add-on will match the style of NI examples.

Additional resources referenced by this document:

Example Style VI Analyzer Test Suite - LV Add-ons

Silver Versions of Non-Silver Controls

Template VIs for New Examples and Example SubVIs

[SteenSchmidt]

Regarding your recommended file naming convention of using spaces instead of CamelCase for instance;

Many interfaces don't play nicely with spaces in file names. Things such as some source code control software, commandline interfaces, web browsers (URL creation), and document managment systems (e.g. MS Sharepoint).

For those reasons we avoid spaces in file names, but create human readable strings (with spaces and proper casing) for menu entry points, terminal names, API properties and methods, and for shortcuts created after install for instance. But file names in the source are without spaces (we use CamelCase).

Do you feel we're out of those dark ages by now?

Cheers,

Steen

[Darren]

These are the guidelines we followed during our company-wide scrub of LabVIEW examples for 2013 and 2014. To my knowledge we did not encounter any problems like you describe in any files we placed in the LabVIEW\examples folder. The names of .vi and .lvproj files are what appear in the NI Example Finder (for better or worse), so I wanted those to be in easily-readable English (with spaces).

Also note that that the specific requirement you're citing starts with the words "Unless you have a good reason not to...".

[REAL!]

Hi,

I am looking to submit a Toolkit onto the Tools Network that includes several examples that I would like to incorporate into the example finder. The problem I have with this is to do with the icon requirements in this document, in that my examples use SubVI's from the toolkit (hence the same SubVI's as are available on the pallet) so the icon will be the same and not with the little glyph in the corner

There is no way to avoid this as the whole point of my examples are to demonstrate how to use the toolkit. Obviously the top level VI icon is no issue.

If I don't comply with these requirements will my Toolkit be rejected from the approval process?

Cheers,

Darren.

[David_L]

Hi Darren,

Regarding the icon, the recomendation here is that any VI that is explicitly an example or a subVI of the example should have that icon to help differnetiate it from the actual subVIs that are part of the toolkit.  This means your toolkit icons should stay as they are, and your example icons should include the extra glyph.

That said, please keep in mind that the above guidelines are what NI uses for all of our Examples.  These are highly recommended if you want to achieve the same quality of the NI examples, but are not required to get your product on the LabVIEW Tools Network.  The requirements for getting on the LabVIEW Tools Network are listed in the Compatible With LabVIEW requirements document at ni.com/compatiblewithlabview