We are going to change the Channel wire appearance

[AbandoningCausality]

What if we got rid of all the bends and had the wires going diagonal or sort of spliney. That would make it look different.

What if we could optionally hide the wire so that only the flanges are showing. Many people are happy enough with functional globals which also don't have wires connecting them.

[Mads]

Unfortunately a lost case AbandoningCausality....I argued for such an approach in several posts in this thread.

[jk49]

Functional globals are the perfect solution if you do not wish to show connections.  On the other hand, if it is important to you to see where data is being produced and where it is being consumed then Channels are the way.  The whole raison d'etre for Channels was precisely to show the connection between a producer of data and the consumer.  And, with the exception of the High Speed Stream, all Channels are actually built using functional globals!

[sth]

jkodosky wrote:

all Channels are actually built using functional globals!

LV2 style globals and not queues?  Hmmm....  But either is the same way of passing data around the diagram outside of functional flow control.  The visual link on the diagram between your queue endpoints (Or FGV calls) is a readability issue and not functional.

I think this is a great way to visualize the data flow in a LV program.  Globals and data connectivity are always a problem.  I think my first post to info-labview was on how to make a global variable in LV 1 before the shift register was invented!  This is much much better whateve the visual cue is.

[AristosQueue (NI)]

sth wrote:

LV2 style globals and not queues?

Jeff did mention the High Speed Channel. 🙂 It has decreased functionality in exchange for greater throughput. Not a whole lot greater throughput -- the other channels are going to be indistinguishable for most people's usages, but the HS Channel uses the queue refnums under the hood and achieves 1.1x performance of the raw queue refnums, but with some better system management bought for that performance slice.

[sth]

Ok, so the "channels" are generic enough that they can be FGV or queues and the implementation is up to the channel author.  Great!  The tradeoff from spped and functionality is then up to the user (coder).

[AristosQueue (NI)]

We sure hope so.

Writing your own channels is not something we are publishing in LV 2016. You can do it, but it'll be a still behind-the-scenes-you-have-to-know-to-ask-the-question type of feature, not something we document for all users. We discussed making it a full feature, but to do that, we'd want a lot more editor polish. The implementations we are shipping have some requirements that we would want to either relax or automate before we support the creation of custom channels for users generally. For example, the Write node of a new channel must have a terminal named "element" for the data being written. Nothing else will work. But we don't currently break the VI if you name it something else, and we don't have a template with locking applied to start working from. All of that would be in the future. For now, we have the ability, but it would be in close coordination with the folks on this forum to make it work for you. That makes it a bit different from most unpublished features of LabVIEW. This one is well tested but it is somewhat magical to use correctly. Your best bet is to clone an existing channel template and then modify from there.

[sth]

AristosQueue wrote:

We sure hope so.

This one is well tested but it is somewhat magical to use correctly. Your best bet is to clone an existing channel template and then modify from there.

"When the manual states the the program performance depends on the phase of the moon, the programmer must be prepared to look out the window."  🙂

There are a the standard channels and I think that there isn't a lot of reason to customize more, but it is a possibility to keep in mind.  Thanks.

[AbandoningCausality]

I want the best of both worlds. I want to show the relationships but I also like the ease of use of the functional globals. I think the best balance is to optionally show the channels  (on mouse over or key stroke) and auto route them similar to Aristo's suggestion

[sth]

No, no...  I really dislike hidden pop-ups!  Then the diagram is not representative of the code until you mouse over it and or click on things like whack-a-mole.  This is as bad as express VIs that need to be opened to see what the actual calling parameters are and how it is configured.  Don't get started on stacked sequences that hide the code.  Readability is next to reliability!!!

Personally I liked the visual difference of bezier curves for the channels but I can live with the selected decison of a more subtle difference.